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Lot 81

 

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Akbar Padamsee has been creating portraits for several decades, and although his style and technique have evolved since the first series he painted in the 1950s, his attitude towards this subject 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 creating portraits for several decades, and although his style and technique have evolved since the first series he painted in the 1950s, his attitude towards this subject 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 in these canvases, carefully avoiding any tawdry display that might undermine their complexity and meaning. Like his Metascapes and Mirror-Image landscapes, these intimate and refined portraits seem concurrently ephemeral and eternal.

Using a palette knife to apply his paint in thick, textured strokes, Padamsee “…crafted images that were emphatically human. They were images of men and women who had aged, endured sadness and experienced the loneliness of time” (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 214).

The poet Eunice de Souza recognizes Padamsee’s talent for capturing the complex emotions of his subjects in these portraits, 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. 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” (Akbar Padamsee, Art Heritage exhibition catalogue, 1980, not paginated).

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