Important Notice

British-born artist Desmond Lazaro straddles the fine edge between contemporary image-making and traditional Indian aesthetics in his art. In the present lot, he depicts a rundown-looking Ambassador car, an automobile associated strongly with Indian culture and once a symbol of status and affluence. "Lazaro's larger skill lies in how he picks up elements often throwbacks to the '70s and yet manages to retain a stark, contemporary edge. For... British-born artist Desmond Lazaro straddles the fine edge between contemporary image-making and traditional Indian aesthetics in his art. In the present lot, he depicts a rundown-looking Ambassador car, an automobile associated strongly with Indian culture and once a symbol of status and affluence. "Lazaro's larger skill lies in how he picks up elements often throwbacks to the '70s and yet manages to retain a stark, contemporary edge. For instance, an Ambassador is as retro as it gets. A rusted Ambassador however is contemporary, for it has to be that old to be so jaded." (Vishwas Kulkarni, "Hands-on and honed," Mumbai Mirror, 17 September 2008, online)

By giving central focus to this quotidian object, Lazaro apotheosises the car and gives the colonial relic a dignified status in the eyes of the viewer. "Lazaro's work... makes mundane objects into precious artefacts, their preciousness enhanced by his use of pure jewel colours... The earlier works are more the things he loves about India: objects that are for you as the viewer, and for him as a painter, precious spaces to see." (Naman Ahuja, "The hand that leads the eye leads the hand," Desmond Lazaro: Paintings, Mumbai: Chemould Prescott Road, 2008, online) The emphasis on the enshrining of the everyday object is reiterated by his use of special pigments derived organically and prepared painstakingly in his studio.

While completing a Master's in painting from the M S University of Baroda in the early 1990s, Lazaro came across the master miniaturist Bannu Ved Pal Sharma of Jaipur - recommended to him by Nilima and Gulammohammed Sheikh. Lazaro served as his apprentice on and off for ten years, learning traditional Indian art forms, which came to define his artistic practice. An influential form in his work is that of the traditional pichwai, a 400-year-old Rajasthani practice which depicts detailed narratives based on the Hindu deity Krishna through intricate visuals on cloth. The study of pichwais formed the basis of Lazaro's PhD thesis, with a special focus on the cotton-painted pichwais of the Pushtimarga sect at Nathdwara.

In works like the present lot, Lazaro combines the traditional methods of miniature and pichwai painting with the modernist ideal of the singular, mundane image, creating a successful marriage of the two. "In these...works I continue to employ traditional techniques in a craftsman like manner through the stringent preparation of all my materials: cloth, paper, brushes and pigment colours. These materials are an integral part of the process of painting. However, by changing the imagery, 'context and meaning' inevitably shift. The pichhvai scale continues although the iconography moves from the sacred to the secular; rusting cars, shards of modern life, modernity itself is animated... the often-discarded moments, people and places, ordinary and everyday things, become elevated and transmuted." (Artist quoted in Ahuja, online)

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