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Lot 38

 

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"I cannot really write or talk about my paintings. I paint. With me painting is a happening, it just happens" (V.S. Gaitonde in a letter to Krishen Khanna, 20 December, 1962).

By the early 1970s, V.S. Gaitonde's creative process had been perfected into a lyrical yet tightly controlled one, where the artist painstakingly created and manipulated colour, light and space through the play of pigments across the surface. Following a visit... "I cannot really write or talk about my paintings. I paint. With me painting is a happening, it just happens" (V.S. Gaitonde in a letter to Krishen Khanna, 20 December, 1962).

By the early 1970s, V.S. Gaitonde's creative process had been perfected into a lyrical yet tightly controlled one, where the artist painstakingly created and manipulated colour, light and space through the play of pigments across the surface. Following a visit to the United States on a John D. Rockefeller III Fund fellowship, and his exposure to abstract expressionism, the artist's beliefs that first, painting was an experimental rather than narrative process, and second, that no painting was limited to a single frame or complete in and of itself, were firmly cemented. Describing this development, the artist's biographer and critic Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni notes, "The creating of texture in an unconventional way, the use of thick lugubrious pigment, the evocation of light and finally, the subtle balancing of the image on the canvas as if it were undulating on water and gradually surfacing in the light, all these are attainments of a time when the individual canvases may not be too distinctive" (Gaitonde, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1983, not paginated).

A stickler for process and perfection, Gaitonde's work was always meticulous, and his output far from prolific. "The continual work of laying on pigment, dissolving it, stripping it off, and overlaying (like a process of nature) comes to a natural close as the pigmentation comes to a natural conclusion. The painter is at the controls, he decides when the painting has arrived at its capacity to articulate, yet he registers this intuitively: 'Like music, I know when it is at an end'. So far his visual sensibility has been absorbed in the action of painting. Now it takes over and finalizes. He takes his time about this. He lives with the painting; views it continually" (Pria Karunakar, "V.S. Gaitonde", Lalit Kala Contemporary 19-20, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1975, p. 16).

The present lot, executed in 1971, illustrates Gaitonde's profound understanding of the properties and abilities of his medium, and the immaculate way in which he was able to control light and shade through pigment. Here, the surface is built with several subtly graded, translucent layers of orange, rust and umber, running from a darker and more heavily layered lower band, which anchors the image, to its lucent, almost fluid center, where a few intense points of pigment have been allowed to punctuate its layers and escape to the surface.

Speaking about colour in Gaitonde's paintings, Jaya Appasamy characterizes them as juxtapositions of reticence and expansiveness. She notes that in these compositions, "...the gentle gradations [of colour] form a liquid matrix in which small and more solid outcrops of form appear to float. The style itself is reticent saying or suggesting only the least that needs to be stated. The colours too are limited and quiet and often consist of hues of the same colour. The whole painting has a certain expansiveness because the composition is open and can be thought of as part of a larger reality" ("The Paths of Abstraction", Ibid., p. 6).

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