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Lot 76

 

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In the late 1970s, Raza’s body of work underwent a significant transition. So radical was this shift, that Raza believes it was only at this point that he was born as a painter. He noted, “In terms of painting, immense possibilities seemed to open, based on elementary geometric forms” (as quoted in Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, Media Transasia Ltd., New Delhi, 1997).

Moving away from expressionism and loose,... In the late 1970s, Raza’s body of work underwent a significant transition. So radical was this shift, that Raza believes it was only at this point that he was born as a painter. He noted, “In terms of painting, immense possibilities seemed to open, based on elementary geometric forms” (as quoted in Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, Media Transasia Ltd., New Delhi, 1997).

Moving away from expressionism and loose, gestural brushwork, Raza began subjecting his surface to geometric parameters and frames, frequently centering on a solid black dot or bindu. In Raza’s work, this concentrated point symbolizes both the beginning and end of the cosmos from which all matter and life is generated, and into which it is eventually reabsorbed. Anchoring the metaphysical preoccupations of the artist’s aesthetic and his search for ‘significant form’, the bindu “…symbolises 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” (Ibid., p. 134).

Using this new geometric vocabulary of lines and shapes, Raza alluded not just to the atmosphere of a scene, but to its cosmological implications as well. The present lot is one of the earliest canvases from this phase of the artist’s oeuvre, and bears an inscription in his hand on the reverse stating that it is “One of the first paintings of the early period when ‘Bindu’ became the central image”.

Here, Raza divides the surface equally between two horizontal fields, one orange and one blue. Through the pairing of these complementary colours, Raza alludes to the numerous dualities that inform life and the universe. From the continual cycle of life and death, the artist extrapolates the relationship shared by day and night, light and dark, male and female energies. At the very center of the surface is the bindu, straddling both fields as if to suggest it controls the delicate equilibrium maintained between these oppositional forces.

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