Important Notice

"Nature, for this artist, is something eternally alive. It is embedded in the cosmos as a whole and actually does not refer to the world we live in today, but is open to evolutionary questions such as the ‘where from’ and ‘where to’. What we see reminds us of many regions and worlds, which exist in the mind and imagination as well as in reality, and, therefore must be recognised. Raza believes that nature moves itself rather than being moved by... "Nature, for this artist, is something eternally alive. It is embedded in the cosmos as a whole and actually does not refer to the world we live in today, but is open to evolutionary questions such as the ‘where from’ and ‘where to’. What we see reminds us of many regions and worlds, which exist in the mind and imagination as well as in reality, and, therefore must be recognised. Raza believes that nature moves itself rather than being moved by the beholder" (Friedhelm Mennekes, "Soft Polarity", S.H. Raza – Paintings from 1966 to 2003, The Fine Art Resource Berlin exhibition catalogue, 2003, unpaginated).

In this piece, titled Jala, Raza pays homage to one of the five primary constituents of nature, water. Although nature has always inspired the artist’s work, it was only during the mid-1980s that Raza began to overtly depict its five basic elements in various combinations and manifestations using geometric forms and bright, primary colours. In using this non-representative idiom, based on ancient Indian ideas of nature and its forces, "…Raza turns away from the external to the internal substance. There is an implicit sense of timelessness which is all-pervasive, which brings a different meaning to his pictures. There is no reference here, as with his earlier work…Instead he has ‘abstracted’ from nature its essence, its deeper implications for mankind" (Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza`s Vision, Media Transasia, New Delhi, 1997, p. 27). Here, while his aqueous cool, palette refers directly to the element, water, the series of inverted triangles symbolize its feminine generative capacities.

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