Important Notice

Following his exposure to the New York school of painters and to Abstract Expressionism on a visit to the United States in the early 1960s, S.H. Raza found himself turning away from mimetic representation to describe the more intangible aspects of a landscape on his canvases. Thus, in the mid 1960s and early 1970s, exploiting the fluidity and freedom of acrylic, Raza deftly manipulated colour and light to focus on the emotion a scene evoked... Following his exposure to the New York school of painters and to Abstract Expressionism on a visit to the United States in the early 1960s, S.H. Raza found himself turning away from mimetic representation to describe the more intangible aspects of a landscape on his canvases. Thus, in the mid 1960s and early 1970s, exploiting the fluidity and freedom of acrylic, Raza deftly manipulated colour and light to focus on the emotion a scene evoked rather than its physical attributes. “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 be felt – through all the senses” (as quoted in Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, Media Transasia Ltd, New Delhi, 1997, p. 148).

This autonomy and experimentation with pictorial space, however, was accompanied by remembrance, and during this period, Raza’s work drew heavily on his childhood memories of Madhya Pradesh and the intense emotions that the central Indian landscape stirred in him. Preceding the introduction of the bindu in his oeuvre, these works “…represent [an] exploratory stage, conjuring up in their depth the forbidding forests of Madhya Pradesh. These canvases are intuitive, restless assertions of the brush, still searching for a leitmotif” (Geeti Sen, Raza, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1990, not paginated).

In particular, Raza recalled the experience of nighttime in the densely forested village of Kakaiya, where he was born, creating several large-format meditations on the role of darkness in the gestation of colour and life. As the artist explains, “The most tenacious memory of my childhood is the fear and fascination of Indian forests…Nights in the forest were hallucinating; sometimes the only humanizing influence was the dancing of the Gond tribes” (as quoted in Jacques Lassaigne, Raza Anthology 1980-90, Gallery Chemould, Bombay, 1991). Speaking about these works, with their gestural abstractions, Yashodhara Dalmia notes, “…the dark paintings with their resonances of night and its flickering lights are compelling compositions…They evoke powerful emotions even as their colour juxtapositions create a throbbing movement on the surface” (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 156).

In the present lot, an epic canvas titled ‘La Provence Noire’, Raza masterfully uses an emotive, largely monochromatic palette to recreate the elusive mood brought on by the descent of night. Inviting and sinister at the same time, the juxtaposition of light and dark in this dusk scene also speaks of the significance Raza affords cyclical oppositions like day and night in his very personal understanding of the universe. For the artist, the colour black held immense meaning and potential; it was the ‘mother colour’ from which all other hues were born. Just as day emerged from the dark of night, colour and light emerged from blackness.

This abstract expressionist landscape also represents the culmination of the artist’s experiments with acrylic and the fluid or lyrical brushstrokes it allowed him. “Acrylic lends itself to the language of gesture. The technique allows for fluidity of forms, for radical changes in the picture – for a transformation in his vision that becomes truly miraculous” (Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, Media Transasia Ltd, New Delhi, 1997, p. 79).

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