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拍品专文
Sabavala is a poet who distils the essence of his native landscapes and atmospheres into a semiabstract form that is actually refined, highly controlled and quite original. Within a deliberate austerity that approaches asceticism, he sums up the quality of the light, the climate, the stillness, the mystery, the whole vastness of the place.
- E. Gage, The Scotsman, Edinburgh, 1969
It was during the early 1960s, a period of intense clarification in Jehangir Sabavala’s work, that the artist defined and focused the language that would make his paintings “visionary landscapes” and “site[s] of epiphany” that transcended common genres and motifs. Describing this change, the artist’s biographer Ranjit Hoskote notes, “Between 1961 and 1964, Sabavala attempted to break away from the suffocating formality of Synthetic Cubism; and in this, he found a remedial alternative in the work of Lyonel Feininger […The artist notes,] ‘Through Feininger’s pure, precise and yet very delicate and personal renderings of cloud and boat and sea, I discovered the joys of extending form into the beauty and clarity of light. I became interested in the source of light, its direction, its effect. Through these experiments, gradually, my work changed’” (R. Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai, 2005, pp. 89, 95).
In this painting from 1963 titled The Radiant Spheres, Sabavala masterfully manipulates light, color and texture to achieve one of the visual epiphanies that Hoskote describes above, transcending familiar landscapes to approach undiscovered quarters of the cosmos. In paintings like this one, “the light now permeated the canvas in varying degrees, as tissues, as suffusions, to produce a shifting topography of translucent seas, opaque headlands, clouded plateaux, free-floating atmospheric forms. The handling became freer, the emphasis shifted from the particular to the universal” (R. Hoskote, Ibid., 2005, p. 97).
A significant marker on Sabavala’s artistic journey towards the archetypal, here the artist offers viewers a sky with both the sun and the moon, each reverberating with energy and charging the atmosphere around it with a unique light. Jagged yet meticulously mapped shards of color abut and interact with each other in this ethereal setting, where solar and lunar forces have been reconciled and harmoniously share space and time. Below these luminous ‘radiant spheres’, the sea reflects the tranquil balance between the smoldering reds and oranges and aqueous blues and greens of the sky. Silhouetted sails of quiet boats rise from the sea into the sky, bridging the horizon as they are illuminated by the spectral light above them.
Speaking about this period of Sabavala’s career, the critic S.V. Vasudev noted that he is, “No more concerned with producing mnemonics for nature, the artist concentrates on shapes in space and seeks to align the subjective, expressionistic urge with purely painterly values and technique, making use of Cubistic elements without rejecting the Impressionist feel for colour and light. The delicacy in applying colours wherever the rarified atmosphere is to be captured, the repeated search for forms seeking release in foreboding skies and seas, the undefined mood, suggest a certain turmoil in the artist’s mind. But one is aware all the time of Sabavala’s attempt to enrich and enliven his palette on a note of subtlety of broken and combined tones, assisted by ingenious brushwork” (S. Vasudev, ‘Analytical Notes’, Sabavala, Mumbai, 1966).
- E. Gage, The Scotsman, Edinburgh, 1969
It was during the early 1960s, a period of intense clarification in Jehangir Sabavala’s work, that the artist defined and focused the language that would make his paintings “visionary landscapes” and “site[s] of epiphany” that transcended common genres and motifs. Describing this change, the artist’s biographer Ranjit Hoskote notes, “Between 1961 and 1964, Sabavala attempted to break away from the suffocating formality of Synthetic Cubism; and in this, he found a remedial alternative in the work of Lyonel Feininger […The artist notes,] ‘Through Feininger’s pure, precise and yet very delicate and personal renderings of cloud and boat and sea, I discovered the joys of extending form into the beauty and clarity of light. I became interested in the source of light, its direction, its effect. Through these experiments, gradually, my work changed’” (R. Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai, 2005, pp. 89, 95).
In this painting from 1963 titled The Radiant Spheres, Sabavala masterfully manipulates light, color and texture to achieve one of the visual epiphanies that Hoskote describes above, transcending familiar landscapes to approach undiscovered quarters of the cosmos. In paintings like this one, “the light now permeated the canvas in varying degrees, as tissues, as suffusions, to produce a shifting topography of translucent seas, opaque headlands, clouded plateaux, free-floating atmospheric forms. The handling became freer, the emphasis shifted from the particular to the universal” (R. Hoskote, Ibid., 2005, p. 97).
A significant marker on Sabavala’s artistic journey towards the archetypal, here the artist offers viewers a sky with both the sun and the moon, each reverberating with energy and charging the atmosphere around it with a unique light. Jagged yet meticulously mapped shards of color abut and interact with each other in this ethereal setting, where solar and lunar forces have been reconciled and harmoniously share space and time. Below these luminous ‘radiant spheres’, the sea reflects the tranquil balance between the smoldering reds and oranges and aqueous blues and greens of the sky. Silhouetted sails of quiet boats rise from the sea into the sky, bridging the horizon as they are illuminated by the spectral light above them.
Speaking about this period of Sabavala’s career, the critic S.V. Vasudev noted that he is, “No more concerned with producing mnemonics for nature, the artist concentrates on shapes in space and seeks to align the subjective, expressionistic urge with purely painterly values and technique, making use of Cubistic elements without rejecting the Impressionist feel for colour and light. The delicacy in applying colours wherever the rarified atmosphere is to be captured, the repeated search for forms seeking release in foreboding skies and seas, the undefined mood, suggest a certain turmoil in the artist’s mind. But one is aware all the time of Sabavala’s attempt to enrich and enliven his palette on a note of subtlety of broken and combined tones, assisted by ingenious brushwork” (S. Vasudev, ‘Analytical Notes’, Sabavala, Mumbai, 1966).