Important Notice

From the time he founded the Progressive Artists` Group in Bombay with a small collective of likeminded artists in 1947, S.H. Raza`s artistic career has centered on the pursuit of `significant form` – a term coined by the renowned British critic Clive Bell to describe that perfect combination of line, colour and shape which leads, via emotion, to a `world of aesthetic ecstasy` (Clive Bell, "Art and Significant Form", Art, 1913).... From the time he founded the Progressive Artists` Group in Bombay with a small collective of likeminded artists in 1947, S.H. Raza`s artistic career has centered on the pursuit of `significant form` – a term coined by the renowned British critic Clive Bell to describe that perfect combination of line, colour and shape which leads, via emotion, to a `world of aesthetic ecstasy` (Clive Bell, "Art and Significant Form", Art, 1913).

However, even after drawing from the philosophy of schools of thought as varied as Post Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism in the development his artistic vocabulary, Raza felt that something elemental, a core aesthetic that moved both creator and viewer, was still missing in his work. It was only during his travels to India in the 1980s, almost forty years after he began to paint, that the artist chanced upon the path to `significant form`. Although he had always been a painter of nature, these trips "re-sensitised his perceptiveness for a final supreme and universal viewing of nature, not as appearance, not as spectacle but as an integrated force of life and cosmic growth reflected in every fibre of a human being…Nature became to Raza something not to be observed or to be imagined but something to be experienced in the very act of putting paint on canvas" (Rudolf von Leyden, "Metamorphosis" in Raza, Chemould Publications and Arts, Mumbai, 1985, unpaginated).

Raza frequently refers to this `re-sensitisation` as a rebirth, claiming that his discovery of significant form helped him to finally emerge from the artistic womb he was encased in for the last several decades. Uniting this new, holistic experience of nature with a pure, plastic ordering of form, Raza began to eliminate all that was superfluous in his images and develop a new and highly concentrated symbolic idiom. Through this symbology, nature and its processes were pared down to their most essential elements, many of which were inspired by tantric beliefs and the ancient Indian cosmology of the Vedas. At the heart of this universe was the bindu or black dot, symbolizing the source and end of all life in the cosmos. Appearing in his earlier work as `sourya` or `black sun`, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, "…the point, the bindu, symbolises the seed, bearing the potential of all life, in a sense. It is also a visible form containing all the essential requisites of line, tone, colour, texture and space. The black space is charged with latent forces aspiring for fulfillment" (Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza`s Vision, Media Transasia Ltd, New Delhi, 1997, p. 134).

In this epic canvas from 1992, the bindu doubles as a seed or germ, representing the very beginnings of the process of germination or ankuran, one half of the life cycle that sustains nature and the universe. Here, the bindu, compact and charged with life potential, is contained within a womb-like chamber guarded by a pair of snakes joined at head and tail. The growing seed is surrounded by bold diagonals that intersect to form the triangular symbols of purush and prakriti, or the male and female energies that have combined in its fertilization. Above the bindu, a large inverted triangle symbolizes the predominance of prakriti, or kinetic female energy, in the germination process; below it, a compact field of concentric black rings represents the force it will soon pulsate with, radiating its potential to the rest of the cosmos.

At the same time that the gestural forms of Raza`s abstract landscapes gave way to this more exact network of shapes and lines, his vivid palette also transformed to take on the earthy tones of the Indian landscape that inspired this change in idiom. Here, Raza uses colour, particularly shades of ochre, umber, sienna, red and brown, to represent the searing heat and passion of Central India, where he was born and raised. "The dazzling intersections and cross sections that create triangles revolving around a floating bindu for unparalleled geometrical structures. The juxtapositions of colours set off their own vibrations charging the canvas with an extra dimension" (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 164).

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