Important Notice

Apart from being an activist, Jagdish Swaminathan was a deeply spiritual painter who believed that it was nature alone that could lead man out of his maze of worldly concerns. "Swaminathan's subject here is a transcendental, pristine view of nature. It is a view that antedates the corruption and defiling of the Earth. The tree, rock and mountainous forms that defy gravity exist in a time-space void and bespeak a pure, reposeful state. In this... Apart from being an activist, Jagdish Swaminathan was a deeply spiritual painter who believed that it was nature alone that could lead man out of his maze of worldly concerns. "Swaminathan's subject here is a transcendental, pristine view of nature. It is a view that antedates the corruption and defiling of the Earth. The tree, rock and mountainous forms that defy gravity exist in a time-space void and bespeak a pure, reposeful state. In this series…Swaminathan responds to the demand of Indian aesthetics, wherein a heightened meditative state is central to art. The inversion of images…within fields of pure colour emphasizes the illusion of the extension of space" (Gayatri Sinha, India: Contemporary Art from Northeastern Private Collections, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum exhibition catalogue, Rutgers, 2002, p. 116).

In the artist's own words, "…painting was never meant to represent reality in the naturalistic, objective sense, it was the cogent and poetic rendering of an ideal truth in terms of two-dimensional space…The reincarnation of the numinous image will retrieve world painting from the rut of the analytical blind alley, and its palpable presence will remove painting from the realm of drawing room decoration to its fundamental icon-function" (as quoted in The Margi and the Desi: Between Tradition and Modernity, Gallery Espace exhibition catalogue, New Delhi, 2004, unpaginated).

The present composition, like the others from the artist's Bird, Tree and Mountain series of works, serves the ‘fundamental icon-function' of being a pictorial map to the pristine worlds that lie beyond our own limited and sullied one. Clearing the viewers' vision of worldly concerns and leading them to discover the ‘ideal truth' and entirety of their existence, this canvas is a tool of growth and ascension as its symbols suggest. While the bird and tree in the upper panel of the work mirror the zenith of existence, or a fully realised state of being, the geometric staircase in the panel below them is a more concrete emblem of ascent, foreshadowing the direction Swaminathan's work would soon take.

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