Important Notice

One of India’s foremost modern painters, Vasudeo Gaitonde is remembered for the independence, fastidiousness and minimalism of his creative process, as well as for the reclusive nature and limited output that it resulted in. So focused was the artist on the perfection of his craft that, by the 1980s, when he painted the present lot, he had isolated himself from all people and things he believed were not essential to his creative process or... One of India’s foremost modern painters, Vasudeo Gaitonde is remembered for the independence, fastidiousness and minimalism of his creative process, as well as for the reclusive nature and limited output that it resulted in. So focused was the artist on the perfection of his craft that, by the 1980s, when he painted the present lot, he had isolated himself from all people and things he believed were not essential to his creative process or identity as a painter, and would only allow paintings that he considered faultless to survive beyond the confines of his studio.

Fellow artist Prabhakar Kolte explains that Gaitonde “…had immense faith in silence. He followed a rule: painting equals life. He considered it the means as well as the end, the journey as well as the destination. And he was psychologically, intellectually and physically prepared for this odyssey…His belief that silence is creative became increasingly firm, to the extent that his paintings attained an enigmatic quality. He became engrossed in trying to develop the visual aspect of silence. As a result, silence transformed onto the canvas spontaneously as a visual script. Parallels to this can be drawn from Zen philosophy, but it would be incorrect to say he was influenced by it” (“Husain and Gaitonde”, From Art to Art – Essays and Critique by Prabhakar Kolte, Bodhana Arts Foundation, Mumbai, 2008, p. 82).

Gaitonde’s works from the 1980s took this ‘visual script’ of silence to a new level of sophistication. Having mastered the manipulation of colour, light and texture through the meticulous layering and removal of pigment on his surfaces, the artist was able to bestow his paintings with depth and luminosity, simplicity and an air of mystery. In the present lot, vivid tones of red, orange and yellow complement and offset each other, highlighting the unique, almost calligraphic forms that Gaitonde was able to excavate from the translucent layers of pigment. “In these paintings, the medium is not separate from the so-called content”; their infrastructure of forms and colours is a dynamic one, created by the “…tension between a translucent surface – red, blue or brown – and the motifs which lurk on the same canvas but from some distance” (Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni, Gaitonde, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1983, unpaginated).

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