Important Notice

“A painting is to be seen, I am aware. But when the senses are alerted, the different qualities of seeing and hearing are in unison.” ? S H RAZA

S H Raza was introduced to the bindu as a young boy growing up in the heart of India. He was a distractible child, awed by nature in the jungles of Madhya Pradesh and the bindu became a tool to help him focus. He recalled, “Highly impressionable at that tender age, I soaked... “A painting is to be seen, I am aware. But when the senses are alerted, the different qualities of seeing and hearing are in unison.” ? S H RAZA

S H Raza was introduced to the bindu as a young boy growing up in the heart of India. He was a distractible child, awed by nature in the jungles of Madhya Pradesh and the bindu became a tool to help him focus. He recalled, “Highly impressionable at that tender age, I soaked in every single feature of that beautiful landscape. So I let my mind wander. But that was precisely the problem. It wandered excessively, making me, I’m afraid, the worst, most distracted pupil in my class. So that was when it happened—my introduction to a certain idea which was later to become my leitmotif, an integral part of my art, the very backbone supporting my body of work. This was the concept of the Bindu.” His school teacher Nandlal Jharia detained him after class, drew a circle on the wall of the classroom and instructed him to concentrate on it. After some initial difficulty, the circle opened up an entirely new world to him. “Gradually, blotting out much else, my mind settled down to focus solely at the centre. It was uncanny. Savouring every one of its essential requisited colour, line, tone, texture and space. I found myself riveted.” (The artist quoted in “The Indian Eye”, Yashodhara Dalmia, Syed Haider Raza: The Journey of an Iconic Artist, Noida: HarperCollins Publishers, 2021, pp. 166?167)

In the 1970s and 1980s, the period in which the present lot was made, Raza reaffirmed his Indian identity with a series of visits to India. For this, he also engaged with the works of writers like Kabir, Ghalib, Gajanan Madhave Muktibodh, Agyeya, and Mahadevi Verma. The artist made a trip to his home state in 1978 to exhibit his works at the Madhya Pradesh Kala Parishad and revisit his school in Mandala, where he first encountered the bindu. Although circles had been showing up in his works as the contained energy of his black suns before then, the trip gave him the freedom to introduce the bindu as an explicit concept in his oeuvre within only a couple of years. Critic Vajpeyi noted Raza’s desire to reconcile his lifelong pursuit of what he termed significant form with the aesthetic and metaphysical philosophies of the East, “He wished to integrate the essence of his life experiences, his childhood memories, the celebrative aesthetics of India with the plastic skills and sophistication he had so assiduously learnt and imbibed in France. He wanted to return to the age? old tradition through modernity without replacing or abandoning one for the other.” (Vajpeyi quoted in Dalmia, p. 170)

This painting from 1985 is the result of Raza’s stylistic evolution from the gestural to his mature style which brought together his concern for pure plastic order and love Nature. In this phase of his career, his forms became purely geometric as can be seen here, with a large black circle—bisected by horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines and vibrating with the energy of the concentric circles within—dominating the square frame. The circle, an enlarged bindu, became the focal point of his works. The artist regarded this motif, which concurrently represents a void, seed and the “idea of the beginning and the end, of the cosmic emergence of the quintessence of life”, as the culmination of his investigations and preoccupations throughout his career. (“Maturity: The Bindu”, Michel Imbert, Raza: An Introduction to His Painting, Noida: Rainbow Publishers, 2003, p. 50) He declared, “Briefly I would say that the entire research of thirty years or more brought me to the conclusion that the most significant form was a point; a point which can be enlarged to a circle; a circle divided by two lines, one horizontal, the other vertical, the intersection of these two lines creates energy.” (The artist quoted in “Tam Shunya: Black Void”, Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia India Limited, p. 107)

By immersing his practice in Indian philosophy, Raza developed a singular style which eulogises Nature through pure form while standing apart from the prevalent trends in Western abstraction. Art critic Geeti Sen summed up the unique essence of Raza’s oeuvre with, “Raza’s work assumes a distinctly different meaning from the paintings of colour field vision and from hard?edged abstraction. In his canvases, geometrical forms are used to map the universe. Here, the vocabulary of pure plastic form acquires an integral purpose: to relate the shape and rhythm of these forms to Nature.” (Sen, p. 118)

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