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Lot 67

 

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“The heartbeat of a painting depends on the right orchestration of...elements and their variations.” – S H RAZA

The 1960s marked a key period of experimentation and a gradual shift towards the gestural in S H Raza’s oeuvre, particularly around the time the present lot was made. Largely influenced by the abstract or non-figurative artistic expression gaining popularity in France at the time, Raza’s paintings began to consist “solely... “The heartbeat of a painting depends on the right orchestration of...elements and their variations.” – S H RAZA

The 1960s marked a key period of experimentation and a gradual shift towards the gestural in S H Raza’s oeuvre, particularly around the time the present lot was made. Largely influenced by the abstract or non-figurative artistic expression gaining popularity in France at the time, Raza’s paintings began to consist “solely of multicoloured fireworks, devoid of any geometrical organisation and always based on themes related to Nature and its elements.” Over the next few years, “the importance of bhava emerged, a profound sentiment guiding the forms and investing the entire canvas.” (Michael Imbert, Raza: An Introduction to his Painting, Noida: Rainbow Publishers, 2003, p. 39)

He gradually distanced himself from the architectural works of the 1950s following a teaching trip to the University of California, Berkeley in 1962. Inspired by the work of American Abstract Expressionists like Mark Rothko, Sam Francis, and Hans Hofmann that he encountered during his brief stint in the country, Raza began to use loose, gestural brushwork and a vivid, expressive palette to create and convey emotion.

Following Raza’s summer in the United States, “visual reality, the aim to construct a ‘tangible’ world receded. In its place there was a preoccupation with evoking the essence, the mood of places and of people.” (Artist quoted in Geeti Sen, “The Seed and the Fruit: Metaphors in Raza’s Painting,” S. H. Raza, London: Saffronart and Berkeley Square Gallery, 2005, p. 6) The present lot, a 1964 oil on board evocatively titled Minuit d’été (or, a summer midnight), aptly represents this turning point in the artist’s career.

The colour black held immense meaning and potential for Raza who considered it to be the ‘mother colour’, i.e., the colour from which all other hues were born – just as day emerges from the dark of the night, colour and light emerge from blackness. In Minuit d’été, forms appear to materialise from a pitch-black ground, symbolising the eternal process of genesis and the inherent duality of the universe where night and day, birth and death, growth and decay balance each other in the grand scheme of things. Raza simultaneously manages to successfully capture the elusive mood of a warm summer night as well as an atmosphere of yearning and fulfilment, and of loneliness and romance.

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