“The continual work of laying on pigment, dissolving it, stripping it off, and overlaying (like a process of nature) comes to a natural close as the pigmentation comes to a natural conclusion. The painter is at the controls, he decides when the painting has arrived at its capacity to articulate, yet he registers this intuitively: ‘Like music, I know when it is at an end’. So far his visual sensibility has been absorbed in the action of painting. Now it takes over and finalizes. He takes his time about this. He lives with the painting; views it continually” (Pria Karunakar, “V.S. Gaitonde”, Lalit Kala Contemporary 19-20, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1975, p. 16).

Like his other canvases of the 1970s, this large work mirrors the artist’s focus on process and precision, having been slowly developed through the studied application and partial removal of different layers of paint with a roller and palette knife. Here, Gaitonde creates a deep, almost smouldering crimson surface, traversed by several darker horizontals through which his script-like forms, like primitive and undecipherable hieroglyphs, seem to materialize and recede.

Speaking about his canvases, Pria Karunakar notes, “They are sensuous. Each is unified by a single colour. The colour glows; it becomes transparent; it clots. It is this play of pigment, as it is absorbed physically into the canvas, that directs the eye…In the application of the colour itself there is an order. This is hieratic, but implicit. It is never insistent. The colour settles and congeals into a series of approximate horizontals throwing the compositional weight somewhat lower than centre and balancing the left and right of the canvas like the arms of a scale. The order is almost deliberately obscured by the distribution of near–random forms across the surface. These topographical or hieroglyphic forms themselves are made to dissolve into the field like enamel in an encaustic” (Pria Karunakar, “V.S. Gaitonde”, Lalit Kala Contemporary 19-20, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1975, p. 15).

“The continual work of laying on pigment, dissolving it, stripping it off, and overlaying (like a process of nature) comes to a natural close as the pigmentation comes to a natural conclusion. The painter is at the controls, he decides when the painting has arrived at its capacity to articulate, yet he registers this intuitively: ‘Like music, I know when it is at an end’. So far his visual sensibility