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Lot 79

 

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Following the 1970s and the early 1980s, when mythical landscapes and quiet cityscapes dominated Akbar Padamsee’s creative output, the artist returned to the figure in the mid 1980s. Although his style had evolved considerably since the first portraits he painted in the 1950s, the reverence with which the artist approached the portrait, particularly of the solitary figure, remained constant.

In the present lot, a dark 1987portrait of a... Following the 1970s and the early 1980s, when mythical landscapes and quiet cityscapes dominated Akbar Padamsee’s creative output, the artist returned to the figure in the mid 1980s. Although his style had evolved considerably since the first portraits he painted in the 1950s, the reverence with which the artist approached the portrait, particularly of the solitary figure, remained constant.

In the present lot, a dark 1987portrait of a middle-aged man, Padamsee uses thick layers of oil paint, applied with a palette knife, to literally etch the subject out of the background. The earthy palette of brown and blue used by the artist enhances the melancholy mood already set by the man’s lost expression. Nevertheless, the figure, like Padamsee’s other solitary subjects, is not a victim. Rather, he strikes viewers as an intensely private man having weathered loss and sorrow at the hands of passing time, transforming them into inadvertent voyeurs. Eunice de Souza terms this distance between subject and viewer a ‘separateness’, saying that most of the artist’s 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, New Delhi, 1980, not paginated).

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