Important Notice

“I have always been moved by the sweep, the drama, and the magnificent changeability of nature.” - JEHANGIR SABAVALA

Jehangir Sabavala retains a distinct place among his fellow modernists as a classically trained artist who maintained a certain degree of restraint in his landscapes, seascapes, and cityscapes, mostly done in oils. His art "derives its crucial tension from the dialectic between the actual and the idealised:... “I have always been moved by the sweep, the drama, and the magnificent changeability of nature.” - JEHANGIR SABAVALA

Jehangir Sabavala retains a distinct place among his fellow modernists as a classically trained artist who maintained a certain degree of restraint in his landscapes, seascapes, and cityscapes, mostly done in oils. His art "derives its crucial tension from the dialectic between the actual and the idealised: his paintings come to life in the conceptual region between mutable terrain and timeless landscape, raw body and stylised figures, ephemeral flowers and eternal still life. The principal device by which Sabavala transmutes and idealises forms of nature in his paintings is a crystalline geometry, which dissolves bodies, objects and topographies, and reconstitutes them as prismatic structures. Even the relatively abstractionist passages in Sabavala's paintings are carefully modulated through this crystalline geometry; there is no leeway here for the haphazard gesture or the spontaneous pictorial effusion." (Ranjit Hoskote, Occasions of Light: Recent Paintings by Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai: Sakshi Gallery, 2002, p. 7)

While the early 1960s saw Sabavala defining and focussing on the language that would make his paintings "visionary landscapes" and "site[s] of epiphany" that would then go on to transcend common genres and motifs, the latter part of the '60s and the '70s saw him breaking away from the formalism of structured Cubism in order to integrate allegory and certain nuances of mysticism into his work. As stated by Sabavala himself, "No longer am I satisfied with the juxtaposition of planes, the search for rare colour, the almost total denigration of the unpremeditated. It is the intangible which is now my goal. Space and light, and an element of mystery begin to permeate my canvases. Emotions seek a new release in what I hope will become a permanent synthesis of heart and mind." (Ranjit Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai: Eminence Designs Pvt. Ltd., 2005, pp. 89, 106)

This was a period that saw him mastering the interplay of colour, texture, and light, achieving a luminosity that appeared inherent in his landscapes. He layered wedges of colour that made light appear as if it "...slants, slides, stipples, slopes, and points up peaks. The witnessing glory of illumination plays a pivotal role: it identifies the edges of Sabavala's reveries of distance and longing; it plays a discreet game of chess with its Manichean rival, the creeping shadow, the gathering darkness." (Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, p. 133) The '70s also marked the phase where Sabavala "in quest of the sublime, orchestrates a breath-taking interplay of his austere, geometricising stylisation and that opulent, sensuous understanding of colour, that chromaticism which is his forte. The high-keyed palette subsides; the structure achieves an optimal balance between abstraction and representation, a summation of the streams that have poured into his art." (Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, p. 107) This, then, makes Of Cloud and Air II a key transitional work in the artist's oeuvre.

The present lot, part of a duet painted by Sabavala in 1977, highlights his fondness for serial painting - "for pursuing a specific image, mood, theme or formal disposition until he has exhausted its potentialities." As stated by Helene d'Andlau, French graphic artist and close friend of the Sabavalas, "Your world, or rather, your worlds, evoke for me a landscape that is at times Biblical... midway between earth and sky, peopled by dreams and phantasms, beings passing between substance and appearance." (Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, p. 121)

It is impossible to miss the careful planning and construction based on meticulous linear schema and highly nuanced colour planes comprising several minutely graded 'broken tones' that makes Of Cloud and Air II the masterwork that it is. The end result, thus, is an image of land and sky, unlike any other, at once restrained and emotionally charged.

Underlining the complexity of this achievement in Sabavala's paintings, Richard Lannoy notes, "The technique which he evolved quite slowly [...] is based on transparency, glazes, effects of inwardly glowing objects obtained by exploiting the white of the canvas as a kind of backlighting. This gives the surface of his paintings a glistening crystalline sheen. The individual hues and tones, being mixed separately in subtly but cleanly differentiated gradations, impart to the picture surface a cleanliness and clarity of hue which is very unusual. [...] His mastery of light effects is based on a lifetime's study of natural Indian light without resort to banal naturalism." (Ranjit Hoskote, Pilgrim, Exile, Sorcerer: The Painterly Evolution of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai: Eminence Designs Pvt. Ltd., 1998, p. 16)

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