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Lot 39

 

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The lavishly chromatic and ostensibly meditative geometric works by S H Raza reaffirm his significance as a master of modern Indian art. At the heart of his canvases lie a representation of nature which can be recognised throughout his career, whether it emerged through his early expressionist and gestural landscapes, or his mature works characterised by symbolic use of geometry and fueled by principles of spirituality. Raza’s artistic journey... The lavishly chromatic and ostensibly meditative geometric works by S H Raza reaffirm his significance as a master of modern Indian art. At the heart of his canvases lie a representation of nature which can be recognised throughout his career, whether it emerged through his early expressionist and gestural landscapes, or his mature works characterised by symbolic use of geometry and fueled by principles of spirituality. Raza’s artistic journey began in the 1940s with his academic training at the J J School of Art, Mumbai. His earnestness towards painting led him to become one of the founding members of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group, alongside fellow artists M F Husain, F N Souza, K H Ara, S K Bakre and H A Gade. He went on to study painting at Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris, in 1950.

Raza’s time in France deeply enhanced the artistic vocabulary that he had begun to develop through the decade. As the formal structure of his early works receded, Raza worked extensively with his command over colour and medium in the 1960s, as seen in lots 9, 10 and 38. His inner quest towards developing a unique artistic language is highlighted in the transformation that his practice underwent in the late 1970s when he gravitated towards abstraction and symbolism that explored the potential of geometric forms. The vocabulary of form, symbology and composition was born out of his inclination towards Indian philosophies. Beginning with shunya, the state of emptiness, Raza began to rely upon intuition—“The highest perception is of an intuitive order, where all human faculties participate, including the intellect—which is ultimately a minor participant in the creative process. Whatever direction the expression may take, the language of Form imposes its own inner logic, and reveals itself with infinite variations and mutations. The mind can perceive these mysteries only partially. This stage is total bliss, and defies analysis.” (Artist quoted in Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia India Ltd, p. 109)

This transition in Raza’s process and the increased preoccupation with lines, forms and colours began defining his oeuvre, exploring the immense possibilities of geometric forms culminating in what became a leitmotif in his mature works—the bindu. The bindu, the black circle or seed, stands as a metaphor for the origin of all life in Indian philosophy, while also being a sign of shunya, or a void, that is similar to the point from which the universe was created. Raza was introduced to the image of the bindu as a concentration point for meditation by Nandlal Jharia, his teacher, in his native village of Babaria in the Mandala district of Madhya Pradesh. In Raza’s view, the essential form of the bindu possessed “immense energy and potential… It opened up a whole new vocabulary which corresponded, in a sense, to my training in Paris in formalism.” (Artist quoted in Sen, p. 126)

The bindu holds immense concentrated energy and forms the nucleus of the canvas as a life force. It featured as a focal point of Raza’s mature work, through which he explored concepts such as the infinite. The colour black, in which the bindu is most often rendered, held significant importance for Raza, being the colour from which all colours emerge. For the artist the bindu, which appears in his work ranging from a concentrated point to a large black orb, came to symbolise “...the seed, bearing the potential of all life, in a sense. It is also a visible form containing all the essential requisites of line, tone, colour, texture and space. The black space is charged with latent forces aspiring for fulfillment.” (Sen, p. 134) Through the repetition of shapes, forms and colours, Raza believed that “you gain energy and intensity, as is gained through the japmala, or the repetition of a word or a syllable until you achieve a state of elevated consciousness.” (Artist quoted in Sen, p. 128)

The present lot, Bindu, 1999, is representative of Raza’s exploration of diagrammatic arrangements that centred around the circle. “The first painting realised was a dark black bindu with grey and white radiation around– within a square frame. In the centre of the circle was a vertical and a horizontal line. This was the genesis. Slowly, colours started appearing—at first rather dull, and later, more and more bright. By using black with white, red, yellow and blue, which compose the total colour spectrum, a variation of themes came into my work.” (Artist quoted in Sen, p 127) The work is also subtly structured into four quarters, reminiscent of the forms of cosmology. The viewer is engulfed by a series of concentric circles charged by a dynamic energy of time and eternity. The interplay of formation and dissolution “finds its complex articulation in the recurrent image of the bindu, and the forms that emerge from and will eventually be re-absorbed into it.” (Ranjit Hoskote, “The Cartographer of Lost Continents: Thoughts on S. H. Raza’s Art,” Yet Again: Nine New Essays on Raza, Kolkata: Akar Prakar in collaboration with The Raza Foundation and in association with Mapin Publishing, 2015, p. 12)

This geometric vocabulary that came to distinguish the art of Raza’s maturity alluded to nature as well as Indian philosophical, spiritual and cosmological concepts. “Over the seven decades of his practice, S H Raza has been such a cartographer of lost continents of meaning; he is a bridge-maker who recalls us to an awareness of those devices of sensuous knowledge, and also of gnosis, that some of us have perhaps been too eager to abandon to the museum of superseded ideas. Raza has also been a pilgrim in the realms of philosophy and poetics: he has tested out various propositions concerning the relationships between image and resonance, poetry and abstraction, colour and memory, through his paintings.” (Hoskote, p. 9)

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