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).

From 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).

From his first solo show at the Taj Mahal Hotel, Bombay, in 1951 to the last series of paintings he executed, to which the present lot belongs, Jehangir Sabavala's painterly language continuously developed and evolved. Over his career of more than sixty years, which he likened to a pilgrimage, Sabavala never paused to survey the past, but continued to push forward in his artistic quest to find lyricism and serenity in a seemingly irredeemable world.

This unusual landscape is one of the last paintings Sabavala completed before he passed away in 2011. A sombre composition, it is telling of his state of mind at the time as he faced the end of his lifelong artistic pilgrimage. Although the line of pines here recalls the lines of casuarina trees that the artist painted a decade before, their spires are more intimidating somehow. Illuminated by an almost unnatural green light, they block passage to anything situated beyond their stand. The water body whose shore they line is also inexplicably placid, perfectly reflecting the black orb, neither sun nor moon, that presides over the scene.

Although this painting represents a very different 'occasion of light', it still occupies the "conceptual region between mutable terrain and timeless landscape" in which Ranjit Hoskote situates Sabavala's earlier works. As the artist has always done, in this painting, "The principal device by which Sabavala transmutes and idealises the forms of nature...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).

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