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Lot 30

 

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“Pictures of the ‘70’s…represent an exploratory stage, conjuring up in their depths the forbidding forests of Madhya Pradesh. These paintings are intuitive, restless assertions of the brush, still searching for a central theme” (Geeti Sen “Genesis”, Raza Anthology: 1980-90, Gallery Chemould, Mumbai, 1991).

In the early 1970s, Raza began to draw on his childhood memories of nighttime in the densely forested village of Kakaiya, where... “Pictures of the ‘70’s…represent an exploratory stage, conjuring up in their depths the forbidding forests of Madhya Pradesh. These paintings are intuitive, restless assertions of the brush, still searching for a central theme” (Geeti Sen “Genesis”, Raza Anthology: 1980-90, Gallery Chemould, Mumbai, 1991).

In the early 1970s, Raza began to draw on his childhood memories of nighttime in the densely forested village of Kakaiya, where he was born, to create several meditative paintings on the role of darkness in the gestation of colour and life. “It must be said that of this period, with its gestural abstractions, the dark paintings with their resonances of night and its flickering lights are compelling compositions…They evoke powerful emotions even as their colour juxtapositions create a throbbing movement on the surface” (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 156).

In the present lot, the artist skillfully uses a dark palette and loose, gestural brushwork, rather than direct representation, to express emotion, and, in doing so, charges the surface with an imperceptible force that evokes a sense of passion and immediacy. According to Dalmia, these “compelling compositions…evoke powerful emotions even as their colour juxtapositions create a throbbing movement on the surface” reminiscent, perhaps, of the sunlit, festive villages and Gond dancers in the forests of Raza’s memory. Nature in this work, as in the rest of Raza’s oeuvre, is presented as a force to be reckoned with, a cycle without end, whose duality needs to be experienced in the soul, rather than simply imagined or observed.

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