Important Notice

"I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing, and stretching one's arms again transcendental experiences became possible."- Mark Rothko

La Terre is an epic masterpiece of colour and composition that epitomises the convergence of Raza's artistic and philosophical assimilations throughout his 70 year career. From... "I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing, and stretching one's arms again transcendental experiences became possible."- Mark Rothko

La Terre is an epic masterpiece of colour and composition that epitomises the convergence of Raza's artistic and philosophical assimilations throughout his 70 year career. From his impressionistic Bombay townscapes to his geometric mandalas, Raza's style has developed as he both soaks up influences, and breaks free from numerous artistic idioms along his journey. Each phase in his oeuvre signifies not only a technical change in style and medium, but also a significant change in attitude. As Rudolf von Leyden commented as early as 1959, "his powers are deep and large and capable of many mutations". (Rudolf von Leyden, Raza, Sandanga Series, Bombay, 1959)

As a student, Raza's early watercolour paintings were dominated by an obsession to recapture the face of the city, Bombay, in all its differing lights and moods. By the late 1940s to the early 1950s, as his artistic confidence increased, his works began to demonstrate the workings of his imagination. His works began to change from nature observed to nature imagined, and as such from impressionistic to expressionistic.

In 1950, Raza left for France to experience a new world of opportunities and experiences that were simmering in the art capital. The canvases of this period included gouaches and carefully constructed tempera townscapes, which reflected his exposure to medieval European and early Renaissance art and his knowledge of traditional Indian miniatures. However, by the mid 1950s, Raza shifted increasingly towards oil. This medium gave him a passionate new means to express nature through fluid space and colour. In his works of this period, elements of the landscape are still visible but they have become swathed in a sea of light and dark as the idea of the 'subject' gives way to the 'image'. In 1962, Raza was invited by Professor Karl Casten to teach at the University of California in Berkeley. Although short, his time in America altered his creative approach. It was here that he found a muse in the abstract expressionist works of the New York School of painters such as Sam Francis, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hoffman and particularly, Mark Rothko. As Raza states,

"Rothko's work opened up lots of interesting associations for me. It was so different from the insipid realism of the European School. It was like a door that opened to another interior vision. Yes, I felt that I was awakening to the music of another forest, one of subliminal energy. Rothko's works brought back the images of japmala, where the repetition of a word continues till you achieve a state of elevated consciousness...Rothko's works made me understand the feel for spatial perception." (Raza: Celebrating 85 years, Aryan Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2007)

During the 1960s and early 1970s, Raza's canvases gave way to the gestural and became increasingly unstructured. Rendered in thick swirling impasto and pulsating with colour and movement, the outlines of any obvious forms had all but disappeared. However, in the decades that followed, his paintings began to show signs of new geometric parameters and a shift in his use of oils to acrylic. Though the loose brushwork remained, it was now bound within a definite frame composed of solid, horizontal and vertical lines of colour. Unlike other abstract artists of the time, like Frank Stella and Kevin Noland who renounced symbolism, Raza's geometric paintings embraced it. The new value with which Raza sought to communicate his vision of nature and the universe was derived from his origins, that of Indian metaphysics and Indian geometric design.

"[...] I moved to a new period in the eighties. The language of your painting changes when you start listening to silence. Within the silence of solitude, the inner landscape of the human mind moves into another pathway. I learnt to understand polarities-the co-existence of opposites that complement even as they exist. Life and death, man and woman, black and white-everything has a different rhythm. I realized how poetry can contain few words and say so much. Painting became the metaphor of life itself"(A. Vajpeyi, A Life in Art: RAZA, New Delhi, 2007, pg. 345).

Painted in 1986, La Terre is situated at a pivotal point for the artist. It integrates his expressionist techniques into an abstraction of form, laced with geometricity and structured philosophical thought. His network of intersecting lines quiver with fluidity, dissolving and solidifying across the canvas, yet to become the formal shapes and boxes of his later works. The colour planes are not the flat primaries of recent years but resonate with mixed hues and visible brushstrokes. Raza's colour spectrum of choice - sienna, yellow ochre, red, brown, green, while relating to the earth, to terrain and vegetation, are also a reflection of the symbolic meaning of colour to Raza: that of the fundamental elements of creation. His obliques, notably the upturned and downturned triangles, explore the elementary shapes and their permutations, alluding to the primeval and to nature, and were to proliferate in subsequent works. The black sun or bindu has descended from the sky to take a central radiating position on the canvas. It has now become the seed, the source and end of all life.

It is Raza's inherent spirituality and his quest to communicate his vision of nature and the universe that provides the poetic tie from one artistic phase to another. "Raza's paintings are not subject to the rise and fall of fashions; their relevance lies, not in what they are, but in what they do. At their best, Raza's paintings are not nouns with which to burden the memory; rather they are verbs that act directly and palpably on the viewing consciousness" (Ranjit Hoskote, "The Cartographer of Lost Continents", Vistaar: S. H. Raza, Art Musings and Afterimage Publishing, Mumbai, pg. 15).

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