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Lot 27

 

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Akbar Padamsee constructs the portrait in the present lot through brief, staccato dabs of paint applied with a palette knife. The earthy brown tones of the figure, against patches of blue, set a contemplative tone for the painting. Padamsee painted portraits for some time in the 1950s, after which he concentrated on developing his vocabulary for cityscapes and metascapes. He returned to the portrait in the 1980s. The portraits he made during... Akbar Padamsee constructs the portrait in the present lot through brief, staccato dabs of paint applied with a palette knife. The earthy brown tones of the figure, against patches of blue, set a contemplative tone for the painting. Padamsee painted portraits for some time in the 1950s, after which he concentrated on developing his vocabulary for cityscapes and metascapes. He returned to the portrait in the 1980s. The portraits he made during this period echo the painting techniques of his metascapes and are markedly different from his earlier portraits. "Lone figures have allowed him the possibility for exploring the formal and existential meaning of space and the location of the human in it... That is why his portraits... endow a monumentality and ponderousness to the figures." (Bhanumati Padamsee and Annapurna Garimella eds.,Akbar Padamsee: Work in Language, Mumbai: Marg Publications and Pundole Art Gallery, 2010, p. 90)

According to Ranjit Hoskote, "His aim is to allude to the human face in the border zone between likeness and presence, an aim he shares with the Byzantine iconographers of the 6th and 7th centuries AD, who were similarly preoccupied with the reconciliation of numinous spirit with recognisable body. Padamsee dwells on the fascination with one's own face that one experiences on looking into the mirror. He develops this primal moment of narcissism into an invocation to the enduring mystery in the glass: the double, an image that is clearly oneself yet beyond reach on the other side of the glass, and by looking at which we image that most powerful index of the encounter between the 'I' and the 'Other', the face???Thus, the face marks the site of many encounters and identifications for Padamsee???In gazing at these apparently remote figures, we confront our own predicaments, are returned to the loom of time." ("The Ricochet of the Line," Akbar Padamsee: Drawings, Watercolours, Photographs, Mumbai: Pundole Art Gallery, 2004, pp. 4, 5)

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