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Lot 30

 

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“...the aim to construct a ‘tangible’ world receded. In its place there was a preoccupation with evoking the essence, the mood of places and of people.” - S H RAZA

Nature was a constant muse for S H Raza even as his engagement with the subject became increasingly spiritual and symbolic over the course of his career. During his brief stay in America in 1962, he was captivated by the works of abstract expressionists such as Mark... “...the aim to construct a ‘tangible’ world receded. In its place there was a preoccupation with evoking the essence, the mood of places and of people.” - S H RAZA

Nature was a constant muse for S H Raza even as his engagement with the subject became increasingly spiritual and symbolic over the course of his career. During his brief stay in America in 1962, he was captivated by the works of abstract expressionists such as Mark Rothko, Hans Hoffman, and Sam Francis, and inspired to develop his own personalised form of expressionism, which also gradually drew him back to his Indian roots.

By the 1970s, Raza had deepened his exploration of the relationship between geometry, space, colour, and Indian aesthetics. He had replaced his structured landscapes of the previous two decades with a more fluid and gestural form of abstraction, further enabled by a move from oil to acrylic. Rather than constructing pictures of a tangible world, he began to increasingly use colour to evoke certain moods or sensations that dwelled deep in his memory on his canvas. Though the artist had made France his home since the 1950s, his paintings during the 1970s and 1980s were heavily influenced by his memories of his home state of Madhya Pradesh and his many visits to India, which awoke in him a need to reassert his Indian identity. Remarks poet and critic Ashok Vajpeyi, “Raza was also realising the spiritual and metaphysical reverberations of nature which was fast becoming for him both a source and a complex text to be imaginatively and sensuously comprehended. The elements, water, earth, seasons, etc., started to attract his artistic attention and many of these tended to evoke his childhood memories.” (Ashok Vajpeyi, “The Journey,” Raza A Life in Art, New Delhi: Art Alive Gallery, 2007, p. 78)

The present lot was painted in 1979, a year after Raza was invited to Bhopal to receive the State honour from the Madhya Pradesh government and hold his first ever solo exhibition in the state at the Kala Parishad. The event was a great success and once again placed the artist firmly within the modern Indian art landscape. Like many of his paintings from the 1970s and 1980s, the work likely draws on Raza’s childhood memories of the nights he spent in the densely forested village of Kakaiya where his father worked as a forest warden. Recalling his experiences, the artist has said, “The most tenacious memory of my childhood is the fear and fascination of Indian forests…Nights in the forests were hallucinating; sometimes the only humanizing influence was the dancing of the Gond tribes. Daybreak brought back a sense of security and well-being. On market day, under the radiant sun, the village was a fairyland of colours. And then, the night again. Even today I find that these two aspects of my life dominate me and are an integral part of my paintings.” (The artist quoted in Yashodhara Dalmia, “The Burning Landscape,” Sayed Haider Raza: The Journey of an Iconic Artist, Noida: Harper Collins, 2021, p. 79)

Evocative of the earthy hues of Central India’s forests and this dichotomy between day and night, the palette of the present lot is nuanced and predominantly muted, with thick impasto strokes of ochres, muddy greens, and black interspersed with strokes of yellow, red, and white that seem to emerge suddenly out of the darkness. “The whole fabric of the painting appears to be a collated vision of a continuous expanse of the phenomena we have experienced as nature-nature fires, the glow of sunlight, green fields at daytime and in twilight, trees and their forms merging in the night.” (Richard Bartholomew, “Others on Raza,” Ashok Vajpeyi ed., Sayed Haider Raza, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing in association with The Raza Foundation, 2023, p. 111)

The present lot belongs to an important period in Raza’s stylistic evolution when he began introducing geometry and iconography to his practice. Although his brushstrokes remain spontaneous and gestural, they form loose triangular shapes circumscribed within a definite frame of solid, horizontal, and vertical lines of colour, reminiscent of Rajasthani miniature paintings where scenes were set within frames of solid colour. According to art critic Rudolf von Leyden, for Raza, “Painting acts itself out as a natural force, struggling in darkness, breaking into light, shivering in cold, burning in heat, trying to find form and yet dissolving into chaos... the work of art emerges as an entity of vibrating power, metamorphosis incarnate, unchangeable and ever changing like the forces of nature reflected in the human mind.” (Rudolf von Leyden, “Metamorphosis,” Raza, Mumbai: Chemould Publications and Arts, 1985) In the following decades, these lines and geometrical forms would become more precise in the artist’s quest to merge the essence of nature and spirituality on his canvases.

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