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Lot 68

 

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“I like to think of the surface of my paintings as an archaeological site where you can uncover surface after surface.” – AKBAR PADAMSEE

It was in the 1970s that Akbar Padamsee began painting a series of quiet and expansive landscapes that he called ‘metascapes’ – a term that described archetypical environments that had no fixed location in space and no relation to the passage of time. These metascapes emerged from Padamsee’s... “I like to think of the surface of my paintings as an archaeological site where you can uncover surface after surface.” – AKBAR PADAMSEE

It was in the 1970s that Akbar Padamsee began painting a series of quiet and expansive landscapes that he called ‘metascapes’ – a term that described archetypical environments that had no fixed location in space and no relation to the passage of time. These metascapes emerged from Padamsee’s landscapes and were quiet, yet powerful; restrained, yet evocative. “The lakes, rivers, and mountains in his paintings are actually depictions of Water, Earth, and Air. The Sun and the Moon are the great Fires…Padamsee is a materialist, when you define matter as the few irreducible things our life is made of.” (Gieve Patel, “To Pick Up a Brush,” Contemporary Indian Art from the Chester and Davida Herwitz Family Collection, New York: Grey Art Gallery, 1985, p. 10)

Padamsee’s metascapes “include both a truly detached and analytical approach and a fascination for tautological rules. In these paintings the images prod the exercise, form being distilled to reveal the ore. Curiously the endeavour is as old as it is modern: the artistic pursuit of a philosophical intent.” (Mala Marwah, Lalit Kala Contemporary 23, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1979, p. 36)

The uninhabited metascape of the present lot depicts an inky blue sky with fiery orange mountains looming over vast swathes of uninhabited plains. Each impasto facet of the rugged expanse of sky and land of the present lot has been painstakingly constructed with a palette knife by Padamsee, adding texture and subtle tonal variations to evoke a sense of movement, as well as one of endlessness. He creates, through his favourite juxtapositions of cadmium and orange, complemented by browns and blues, a mountainous landscape that is at once real and surreal. Devoid of figuration and any explicit spatial or temporal location, these grand, almost mythical paintings straddle the frontier between representation and abstraction, at once archetypal and timeless.

In catapulting the viewer into a place where geographies and chronologies fade away, the artist underscores the universality of experience. Constantly experimenting with colour, form and structure, these paintings are imbued with an almost hallucinatory calm. They offer no points for reference, making it deliberately difficult to understand scale or to locate the foreground. It is their luminosity which enables a transcendence of notions of time and space.

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