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Lot 65

“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.” In the artist’s own words, “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... “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.” In the artist’s own words, “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” (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, 2001, p.155).

It is these two aspects which Raza mentions that come together in this abstract landscape from 1975, where there is a clear division of the canvas into two parts – day and night, light and dark, joy and fear.

The artist skillfully uses a primary palette and loose, gestural brushwork, rather than direct representation, to express emotion in this piece and, in doing so, charges it with an imperceptible force that bestows on this canvas a sense of immediacy and luminescence. The freedom and autonomy over the canvas afforded to him through his exposure to abstract expressionism, and the fluidity of the acrylic medium aided in the communication of his respect for nature to the viewer. 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. Just when the forms of the night and its darkness seem unending, there are the light, calm surfaces that illuminate what it has hidden. Yet, even as we get comfortable with the warmth of these merging planes of yellows and reds, there is the night lurking close, ready to bathe them in darkness once again. Nature in this work, as in the rest of Raza’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. In his own words, “as a painter, I have to realise the ideas, the moods, the sentiments, in a visual language of form and colour. A painting has to be seen, and to be felt. It has to e felt – through all the senses” (from Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, 1997, p.148).

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