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Lot 33

 

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“Colours expand and contract, colours travel on the surface of the static painting… A colorist needs to master the art of silencing some colours, so as to render the others eloquent.”
- AKBAR PADAMSEE

In the 1970s, Akbar Padamsee began a career-long production of luminous abstracted landscapes he termed metascapes to distinguish them from the traditional landscape which aimed to objectively capture one’s perceived physical... “Colours expand and contract, colours travel on the surface of the static painting… A colorist needs to master the art of silencing some colours, so as to render the others eloquent.”
- AKBAR PADAMSEE

In the 1970s, Akbar Padamsee began a career-long production of luminous abstracted landscapes he termed metascapes to distinguish them from the traditional landscape which aimed to objectively capture one’s perceived physical reality. Having undertaken a study of Paul Klee’s The Thinking Eye-drawn from his pedagogical writings for his Bauhaus lectures, which delineated his theory of image-making-Padamsee was drawn to Klee’s writings on colour which were influenced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s theory of colour. His metascapes, reflecting this influence of Klee’s theories, are made striking by the incandescence of their colour. The heavy saturation of the colour imparts solidity to his forms. Art critic Geeta Kapur notes how Padamsee’s application of colour here takes on a musical role in invigorating his compositions, “The landscape has a density and it has a sonority; for even though one cannot say Akbar is particularly concerned with the analogous nature of music and painting, one hears the throbbing cadence of colour split into its myriad tonalities. The undertone is monotonous and passionate. And the harmony is broad in scope. It lifts itself in a sweep even as from its palpable base the landscape rises to the level of vision.” (“Akbar Padamsee: The Other Side of Solitude”, Geeta Kapur, Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd, 1978, p. 105-106)

Intense oranges and cadmium reds dominate the present lot. At a greater distance from the viewer are situated formations of brown on a dark sky. Padamsee’s skill at the application of oil on canvas is evident in its lush texture. The work stands testament to writer and poet Pria Karunakar’s assertion that in his metascapes, “Colour is rich and significant by intention. It makes its presence felt at once. The image itself almost takes second place. This dense opaque colour is built up from the surface of the canvas and modelled by knife or brush. Painterly. The gesture is important. Through it the painter connects muscularly to the controlling of his pigment.” (Pria Karunakar, “Akbar Padamsee - Nature as Landscape”, S A Krishnan ed., Lalit Kala Contemporary 23, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1977, p. 31)

In a metascape, Padamsee employed many strategies to create a natural path of movement for the eye. “Maximum irradiation” was achieved by first creating colour diagrams on graphs of his own making, taking into account the three planes of colour in a painting. He would assiduously track the interactions between primary colours in order to ensure the lambent result. Leaving no stroke to chance, he would map out the movement of every shade into the other to create the signature “closely woven tonal gradations” (Kapur, p. 109) of his metascapes. His meticulous system of mapping colour allowed him to orchestrate a gradation considering the entire pictorial space to effectively make dynamic the canvas. He has said, “The problem is not one of colour organisation but of colour circuit, where nearness and distance are not determined by proximity. A red linked to a distant blue, ignoring the adjacent orange. Assigning the canvas to an approximate distance from the viewer, not measurable, because tone and colour are travelling in space.” (The artist interviewed by Mala Marwah, “Akbar Padamsee - A Conversation”, S A Krishnan ed., Lalit Kala Contemporary 23, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1977, p. 36)

Beyond directing one’s gaze through the interplay of colour, Padamsee created texture in these works through skillful application of paint with a knife. He built up paint conscious of the direction of application in order to create the correct angles between two strokes which allowed for the desired emanation of light from the work.

Akbar Padamsee’s metascapes stand as a singular achievement in Indian art, with the artist’s exacting analytical process and intense studies of the theories of art coming together to create emotive works of great painterly skill, a pictorial space where sensory perception trumped spatiotemporal cognizance.

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