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Lot 46

 

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Although he has lived and worked in France for most of his life, Raza acknowledges that his art is deeply rooted in Indian tradition, and is a means of creating awareness about his home country. “Raza is in fact constructing through his recent pictures, a paradigm that is both relevant for the world today, and in harmony with traditional Indian concepts. Living in the west with his antennae attuned to pervasive crisis of today, and searching for... Although he has lived and worked in France for most of his life, Raza acknowledges that his art is deeply rooted in Indian tradition, and is a means of creating awareness about his home country. “Raza is in fact constructing through his recent pictures, a paradigm that is both relevant for the world today, and in harmony with traditional Indian concepts. Living in the west with his antennae attuned to pervasive crisis of today, and searching for his own roots in India, his images coalesce into a metaphor. His contribution, in the best tradition of symbiosis, is to create images that possess universal meaning – that relate each one of us to the universe ‘out there’” (Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, Media Transasia Ltd., New Delhi, 1997, p. 27).

In the present lot, Raza uses a dark palette dominated by blue and black to highlight the twin energies of male and female, as a result of whose fusion germination and genesis occur. Apart from the classical tantric symbology of upright and inverted triangles, the artist also alludes to the duality of male and female using variations of the bindu. At the very center, for example, the artist paints a dense black bindu, throbbing with the life potential it contains, above an inverted triangle, to represent garbha or the womb, the site of germination.

Taking geometrical abstraction to unprecedented levels, every colour and shape in Raza’s work embodies a significant connotation relating to an element of nature or to part of the universal cycle of life. “Raza’s work assumes a distinctly different meaning from the paintings of colour field vision and from hard-edged abstraction. In his canvases, geometrical forms are used to map the universe. Here, the vocabulary of pure plastic from acquires an integral purpose: to relate the shape and rhythm of these forms to Nature” (Ibid., p. 118).

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