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Lot 43

 

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“It’s strange that I needed forty years to understand my passion and love for nature, and to transpose this on to canvas. I’m glad that I took all this time, because it was not a gift to me by someone - a teacher, a book, or something else; it was the conclusion of a lifelong experience!” — S H RAZA

S H Raza’s oeuvre is a testament to his deep connection with nature, from his expressionist watercolour landscapes and Cubist... “It’s strange that I needed forty years to understand my passion and love for nature, and to transpose this on to canvas. I’m glad that I took all this time, because it was not a gift to me by someone - a teacher, a book, or something else; it was the conclusion of a lifelong experience!” — S H RAZA

S H Raza’s oeuvre is a testament to his deep connection with nature, from his expressionist watercolour landscapes and Cubist compositions to his abstract works intertwined with the principles of spirituality. Much like his later geometric forms that exude order, Raza’s stylistic evolution can be traced back to his days as a young boy. And although the journey to becoming one of India’s most celebrated and influential modernists was still a long way ahead, the seed, much like the bindu in his later works, had been planted early on.

Raza’s life was one of constant learning – starting with his father, who ensured that the artist and his siblings got a firm grounding in the tenets of Islam while encouraging them to learn about other faiths. It was also during his childhood that the artist had an initial brush with the bindu. It would prove to be an extraneous concept for a young Raza, who was made to stare at a dot on a board by a teacher who hoped to discipline a distracted student. However, it would go on to form the crux of his works decades later, as his art continued to metamorphose.

Growing up in Babaria, Madhya Pradesh, surrounded by verdant forests, Raza’s lifelong affiliation with nature began at a young age, though it would be years until he channelled those emotions onto his canvas. However, to Raza, this connection spanning decades of his life was inevitable. “Wherein past, present, future unite, where the genetic memory, the racial unconscious, your training and your learning, your life of everyday all come together in a very strange indescribable manner and you are able to say the essence of what you have to say, be in painting or poetry. I always come back to the main theme that has obsessed me: nature.” (Ashok Vajpeyi ed., A Life in Art: S H Raza, New Delhi: Art Alive Gallery, 2007, p. 75)

Raza set sail for France in 1950, embarking on a journey that would influence his practice for decades. He studied at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris and travelled across France, Italy and Spain. This, combined with visits to museums and art galleries, led him to understand and appreciate Renaissance and European art, and the use of light, colour, and structure, which in turn influenced his work. By the early 1960s, Raza’s artistic methods underwent another evolution, when he moved from precisely structured landscapes to unrestrained, gestural ones with colour and texture as the primary focus.

By the 1970s, Raza’s art primarily focussed on geometrical shapes, mapping out the metascape of the mind, moving away from figurative and representational forms, and creating composite works in his preferred medium of acrylic. Raza’s trajectory as an artist is perfectly encompassed in this piece titled Amar Jiva, translated to eternal life, where he uses geometric principles deeply intertwined with spirituality. These primary shapes seen in Amar Jiva “are pared down to their essence. They are simple, elementary forms with universal meaning - based on geometric principles which become metaphors for the world he intends to represent.” (Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia India Ltd., p. 110)

Raza’s congruent abstractions create a path to his interior vision, allowing for a state of meditation through deep symbolism. It’s through these pictorial forms that Raza establishes a sense of order in his works – creating a universal language where each shape is assigned a value, allowing the viewer to connect with the canvas. However, to Raza, his concern lies solely with creating a harmonious coordination of elements. And while his canvas is a constantly evolving one, the constant that remains is geometry. Raza has repeatedly acknowledged his use of multiple of 3 in his work, along with his deep penchant for the number 9, noting that it holds a key role in both mathematics as well as human life. For Raza, the number symbolised the formation of life, encompassing the polarity of gestation, birth and extinction.

“Why do these circles, ovals and rectangles attract us- Why do they make us hold our breath and receive their vibrations- The reason is that something linked to the origin of life bubbles up in Raza’s work. At first glance, these geometric compositions may appear to move away from the complexity of the real, and from the nuances, interpretations and surprise that the real holds. However, the compositions on Raza’s canvases express the most exalting and enigmatic encounters extolled in the cosmology of poets: the union of the feminine and masculine.” (Olivier Germain-Thomas, quoted in Vajpeyi ed., p. 132)

Raza’s profound reverence for nature and its five elements – earth, water, fire, sky and ether - is also observed in the present lot. Through tightly controlled forms and an aqueous colour palette, Raza reminds the viewer that life itself is an amalgamation of these elements in tandem with nature. To Raza, this union is what infuses order into the universe across time and space. “To express this concept, he resorts to the principles which govern pictorial language and which, in their turn, infuse order into the canvas. The vocabulary of the poignant line and diagonal, the circle, square and triangle become essential components of his work - as much as they have always remained the principles used by traditional shilpins when commencing their work. In both Raza’s vision and those of the shilpins, the purpose is much the same: to explore the forces that control the sacred order in the universe and to express these forces.” (Sen, p. 137)

An introspection of Raza’s work would be incomplete without addressing the bindu. And while the bindu forms the nucleus of the canvas as a life force, it is also a stark reminder of where transient beings meet their end. “For Raza, it is the bindu which becomes the single compelling image that recurs on canvas with infinite variations – suspended in a timeless zone as a magnetic force that controls the sacred order of the universe. The bindu is sensed and felt by the inner eye, conceived earlier by him as the blinding Black Sun that scorches the earth, and now as the Earth herself with her plenitude of resources – the Earth, self-generating, endowed with the powers of self-renewal.” (Sen, p 142)

The bindu serves as the reminder that although it is the source of life, it also acts as the void, where it “emerges and unfolds itself in the blank space.” (Vajpeyi ed., p. 100) The present lot thus represents how life and death are inherently cyclic, with compelling emphasis on the latter, as the bindu observed in this particular work appears to be off-centre or shifted along its central axis, perhaps reflective of the immense devastation caused by the earthquake in Bhuj, Gujarat the same year. “As a shape and form, the bindu signifies completion. The form which it takes is a circle, whole, intact, self-sufficient and complete – returning again to its point of origin. Hence it connotes the cyclical notion of time, of returning. It’s a man’s journey of returning again and again to his point of departure, his origins, to his beginnings from the earth.” (Sen, p. 145)

With Raza’s bindu perpetuating the circle of life, he presents the viewer with this duality, paying homage to nature’s supremacy over mortal life.

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