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Lot 37

 

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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.

The poet Eunice de Souza recognizes Padamsee's talent for capturing the complex emotions of his subjects in portraits like the present lot, saying "Most of the 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. They have not sought the camaraderie that commitment to a special cause can offer, they have not even in many cases attempted ordinary companionship…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, or whether it is not, in some way, a defence against experience, a withdrawal from involvement and foreseeable pain" (Akbar Padamsee, Art Heritage exhibition catalogue, 1980, p. 5).

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