Important Notice

During the 1970s and 80s, S.H. Raza drew on his childhood memories of the nights he spent in the densely forested village of Kakaiya, where he was born, to create several large-format meditations on the role of darkness in the gestation of colour and life. "Even as the thick, lush forests and the natural surroundings of his childhood were awakened, so was the darker side, the night with all its hidden sounds and fears...It must be said that of... During the 1970s and 80s, S.H. Raza drew on his childhood memories of the nights he spent in the densely forested village of Kakaiya, where he was born, to create several large-format meditations on the role of darkness in the gestation of colour and life. "Even as the thick, lush forests and the natural surroundings of his childhood were awakened, so was the darker side, the night with all its hidden sounds and fears...It must be said that of this period, with its gestural abstractions, the dark paintings with their resonances of night and its flickering lights are compelling compositions…They evoke powerful emotions even as their colour juxtapositions create a throbbing movement on the surface" (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 155, 156).

As the artist explains, "Nights in the forest were hallucinating; sometimes the only humanizing influence was the dancing of the Gond tribes. Daybreak brought back a sentiment of security and well-being. On market-day, under the radiant sun, the village was a fairyland of colours. And then, the night again. Even today I find that these two aspects of my life dominate me and are an integral part of my paintings" (Ibid., p. 155). It is these two aspects that Raza mentions, which come together in this large abstract landscape from 1979, where the progression on the surface from day to night, light to dark, celebration to apprehension, is evident.

As Jacques Lassaigne notes, "Raza always painted an imaginary world, traversed by tragic intensities, with his energies concentrated at the points where his coloured planes overlapped. In the thickness of his matter, a whole network of coloured veins circulated; flashing reds and yellows pierced deep blacks. Effects of tension and nervous agitation upset shadowy zones. The composition itself was affected by this, and in a given work, the compressed pulsations of the forms, the character of which could be defined as anguishing, were in opposition to immense, light and calm surfaces. Thus, ever faithful to his deep sentiments, Raza sought to free himself of the oppression of the night and to glorify the serenity rediscovered in the light of dawn" ("Timeless landscapes", Raza, Chemould Publications and Arts, Mumbai, 1985, not paginated).

In the present lot, the artist skilfully uses a primary palette and loose, gestural brushwork, rather than direct representation, to express emotion, and in doing so, charges the surface with an imperceptible force that bestows the painting with a sense of immediacy and luminescence. According to Dalmia, these "compelling compositions…evoke powerful emotions even as their colour juxtapositions create a throbbing movement on the surface" reminiscent, perhaps, of the sunlit, festive villages and Gond dancers in the forests of Raza's memory. Nature in this work, as in the rest of the artist's oeuvre, is presented as a force to be reckoned with, a cycle without end, whose duality needs to be experienced in the soul, rather than simply imagined or observed.

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