Important Notice

Akbar Padamsee has been painting portraits for several decades, and although his style and technique have evolved since the first series he painted in the 1950s, his attitude towards the genre has remained constant. It is the artist’s belief that expression is heightened in portraits of solitary figures, and even more so in paintings where just the face is situated within spaces charged with infinite possibilities. It is with great reverence,... Akbar Padamsee has been painting portraits for several decades, and although his style and technique have evolved since the first series he painted in the 1950s, his attitude towards the genre has remained constant. It is the artist’s belief that expression is heightened in portraits of solitary figures, and even more so in paintings where just the face is situated within spaces charged with infinite possibilities. It is with great reverence, then, that Padamsee unearths the innermost thoughts, emotions and reactions of his subjects, carefully avoiding tawdry displays that might undermine their complexity and meaning. Like his metascapes and mirror-images, these intimate and refined portraits seem concurrently ephemeral and eternal.

In the present lot, a somber monochromatic portrait of a man wearing a tie, Padamsee uses thick layers of oil paint, applied with a palette knife, to literally etch the subject out of the background. The earthy palette of burnt umber and sienna used by the artist enhances the melancholy mood already set by the man’s downcast expression. Nevertheless, the figure, like Padamsee’s other solitary subjects, is not a victim. Rather, he strikes viewers as an intensely private man having weathered loss and sorrow at the hands of passing time.

Eunice de Souza terms this distance between subject and viewer a ‘separateness’, saying that most of the artist’s figures “…evoke a sense of vulnerability and anguish, yet none of them are simple victim figures. They are not merely alone, but essentially separate from the viewer. This separateness is so persistent a feature of the paintings that one is forced to ask whether it arises out of a sense of the privacy of the self, or an uncompromising existential search in which each man or woman is irrevocably alone” (Akbar Padamsee, Art Heritage exhibition catalogue, New Delhi, 1980, not paginated).

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