Important Notice

“Painting for me grows more personalised, more difficult. Movements, styles, the topical moments, all lose out to the attempt to reach deeper levels of interpretation. Horizons widen and recede, and I see myself as a pilgrim, moving towards unknown vistas” (as quoted in Ranjit Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Eminence Designs Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai, 2005, p. 216).

Since his first solo show at the Taj Mahal... “Painting for me grows more personalised, more difficult. Movements, styles, the topical moments, all lose out to the attempt to reach deeper levels of interpretation. Horizons widen and recede, and I see myself as a pilgrim, moving towards unknown vistas” (as quoted in Ranjit Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Eminence Designs Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai, 2005, p. 216).

Since his first solo show at the Taj Mahal Hotel, Bombay, in 1951, Jehangir Sabavala’s painterly career has evolved and flourished. Today, with more than sixty years of painting behind him, Sabavala does not pause to survey the past, but continues to push forward in his artistic quest to find lyricism and serenity in a seemingly irredeemable world.

Dubbing his paintings of the late 1990s and early twenty first century “occasions of light”, Ranjit Hoskote notes that, “Sabavala’s art derives its crucial tension from the dialectic between the actual and the idealised: his paintings come to life in the conceptual region between mutable terrain and timeless landscape, raw body and stylised figure, ephemeral flowers and eternal still life. The principal device by which Sabavala transmutes and idealises the forms of nature in his paintings is a crystalline geometry, which dissolves bodies, objects and topographies, and re-constitutes them as prismatic structures. Even the relatively abstractionist passages in Sabavala’s paintings are carefully modulated through this crystalline geometry; there is no leeway here for the haphazard gesture or the spontaneous pictorial effusion” (Ibid., p. 168, 176-77).

Part of a sequence of three 2002 paintings that explores the cycle of day and night, the present lot offers a nighttime view of a desolate, sandy outcrop, surrounded by translucent blue-green water. Home to a nothing but a stand of casuarina or ironwood trees, this narrow peninsula seems to be bathed in an ethereal light, even though Sabavala has left the moon out of the steadily deepening indigo sky. Here, the lateral bands of land, sea and sky constructed out of intersecting planes of colour, reflect the deliberate demarcation of space and division of the painted surface that has become a hallmark of Sabavala’s unique style, a studied reworking of the Cubist idiom.

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