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Lot 49

 

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Like the ‘metascapes’ that he began painting in the 1970s, Akbar Padamsee’s series of ‘mirror-images’, begun in 1994, are also mythical landscapes, offering the artist’s meditations on time, space and the nature of existence. Frequently presented in the format of a diptych, where each panel represents an inverted, relative version of the other, these works reflect the duality of perception and reality through form, texture and colour.... Like the ‘metascapes’ that he began painting in the 1970s, Akbar Padamsee’s series of ‘mirror-images’, begun in 1994, are also mythical landscapes, offering the artist’s meditations on time, space and the nature of existence. Frequently presented in the format of a diptych, where each panel represents an inverted, relative version of the other, these works reflect the duality of perception and reality through form, texture and colour.

The idea of the mirror-image as a device struck the artist during his first experiments with printmaking, when he saw the impressions created from a plate that he had engraved. He recalls, “I was surprised to note that the print made from the plate I had etched did not resemble the original. The gestalt had changed. I started using a mirror when working on the plate to figure out what the print would look like. Looking at my face in this mirror, I realized that what I saw was a mirror-image, as unfamiliar as the print from the etched plate” (as quoted in Meher Pestonji, Akbar Padamsee: Mirror-Images, Pundole Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 1994, unpaginated).

Exploring the relationship between an image and its reflection further, Padamsee was startled at how the two could be so similar and yet so different. Drawing this relationship into an existential metaphor, he notes, “Space-cognition and time-cognition depend on a compound duality, inside-outside, expansion-contraction, exhalation-inhalation, the round and the square. We inhale, the trees exhale, we exhale, the trees inhale, a mirrored symbiosis. Expression must contain its dialectical opposite, the conscious and the unconscious on the same psychic plane. I have two eyes, two retinas, but the mind compounds the two images into one. When I make mirror images, they remain two, but a fusion compounds them into one, as the starting point of visual experience” (Ibid.).

In the preset lot, one of the earlier and larger diptychs in Padamsee’s mirror-image series, the artist contrasts hot and cool, land and sky, fire and ether, with a simple yet powerful palette of primary hues. In this remote no-man’s-land, the swirling blue clouds on one panel suddenly darken to brown on the other, casting profound shadows over the glowing fields of brimstone below them. Just as it belongs to no person, this landscape belongs to no time and to no place. Endless and eternal, Padamsee’s mirror-images “…include both a truly detached and analytical approach and a fascination for tautological rules. In the paintings the image prods the exercise, form being distilled to reveal the ore. Curiously the endeavour is as old as it is modern: the artistic pursuit of a philosophical intent ” (Mala Marwah, Lalit Kala Contemporary 23, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1979, p. 36).

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