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拍品专文
I was inspired to conceive a painting which could be a letter to my mother country, India, revealing my experiences, discoveries and acquisitions. I hoped that the painting could be evidence that I was never cut off from my sources. The memories, conscious and unconscious, were ever present.
- Sayed Haider Raza, 2005
Although he spent close to six decades living between Paris and the bucolic countryside of Southern France, Sayed Haider Raza could not extinguish the burning memory of the Indian landscape from his painting. The present lot, titled La Nuit (The Night) and painted in 1972, celebrates the sublime and magical power of the Indian nightscape, invoking the natural world by fusing abstract, symbolic forms into a powerful and mystic expression of the mood and atmosphere the artist remembers from his childhood home in the forests of Central India. Rooted in Raza’s memories of growing up in small and densely forested villages, this painting is an evocative expression of the rich sensory life inherent in the deep, pervasive darkness of the night. A time of myth and magic, the night became profoundly spiritual for Raza.
A decade before Raza painted the present lot, he spent a formative summer teaching at the University of California in Berkeley. During his time in the United States, Raza was deeply impacted by the work of American Abstract Expressionists like Sam Francis, Hans Hoffman and Mark Rothko. Speaking about this encounter, he noted, “Rothko's work opened up lots of interesting associations for me. It was so different from the insipid realism of the European School. It was like a door that opened to another interior vision. Yes, I felt that I was awakening to the music of another forest, one of subliminal energy. Rothko’s works brought back the images of japmala, where the repetition of a word continues till you achieve a state of elated consciousness. Rothko’s works made me understand the feel for spatial perception” (Artist statement, Raza: Celebrating 85 Years, New Delhi, 2007).
Perhaps the most significant technical change in Raza’s career was his shift from oil to acrylic paint, which took place following this summer in the United States. Raza’s works from the mid 1960s onwards display a move away from thick, labored brushwork and impasto built up layer by layer, to a more dynamic, flattened style. The inherent rapid drying and plastic qualities of acrylic paint allowed the artist to paint with rapid, gestural brushstrokes that were freer and more expressive. It was during this period, also, that Raza’s inspiration turned form French landscapes to those of his homeland. The 1970s can thus be seen to represent the zenith of Raza’s painterly nostalgia, a longing for the physical land of his birth. In works from this period, like the present lot, the riotous colors of his prior works evolved into earthy tones and darker palettes, increasingly including swathes of black, a color that would provide the symbolic foundation for his geometric abstraction a few years later.
In La Nuit, primary pigments are balanced against black as their ultimate source. “For black was the mother of all colours and the one from which all others were born. It was also the void from which sprang the manifest universe [...] Some of the most haunting works of this period are those which evoke the night [...] where the liminal sheaths of black are illuminated by sparks of white light [...] As with Mark Rothko, black is one of the richest colours in Raza’s palette and signifies a state of fulsomeness. However, for both painters, colours plumb the depths and are not simply used for their own sake” (Y. Dalmia, ‘The Subliminal World of Raza’, A Life in Art: S.H. Raza, New Delhi, 2007, p. 197).
- Sayed Haider Raza, 2005
Although he spent close to six decades living between Paris and the bucolic countryside of Southern France, Sayed Haider Raza could not extinguish the burning memory of the Indian landscape from his painting. The present lot, titled La Nuit (The Night) and painted in 1972, celebrates the sublime and magical power of the Indian nightscape, invoking the natural world by fusing abstract, symbolic forms into a powerful and mystic expression of the mood and atmosphere the artist remembers from his childhood home in the forests of Central India. Rooted in Raza’s memories of growing up in small and densely forested villages, this painting is an evocative expression of the rich sensory life inherent in the deep, pervasive darkness of the night. A time of myth and magic, the night became profoundly spiritual for Raza.
A decade before Raza painted the present lot, he spent a formative summer teaching at the University of California in Berkeley. During his time in the United States, Raza was deeply impacted by the work of American Abstract Expressionists like Sam Francis, Hans Hoffman and Mark Rothko. Speaking about this encounter, he noted, “Rothko's work opened up lots of interesting associations for me. It was so different from the insipid realism of the European School. It was like a door that opened to another interior vision. Yes, I felt that I was awakening to the music of another forest, one of subliminal energy. Rothko’s works brought back the images of japmala, where the repetition of a word continues till you achieve a state of elated consciousness. Rothko’s works made me understand the feel for spatial perception” (Artist statement, Raza: Celebrating 85 Years, New Delhi, 2007).
Perhaps the most significant technical change in Raza’s career was his shift from oil to acrylic paint, which took place following this summer in the United States. Raza’s works from the mid 1960s onwards display a move away from thick, labored brushwork and impasto built up layer by layer, to a more dynamic, flattened style. The inherent rapid drying and plastic qualities of acrylic paint allowed the artist to paint with rapid, gestural brushstrokes that were freer and more expressive. It was during this period, also, that Raza’s inspiration turned form French landscapes to those of his homeland. The 1970s can thus be seen to represent the zenith of Raza’s painterly nostalgia, a longing for the physical land of his birth. In works from this period, like the present lot, the riotous colors of his prior works evolved into earthy tones and darker palettes, increasingly including swathes of black, a color that would provide the symbolic foundation for his geometric abstraction a few years later.
In La Nuit, primary pigments are balanced against black as their ultimate source. “For black was the mother of all colours and the one from which all others were born. It was also the void from which sprang the manifest universe [...] Some of the most haunting works of this period are those which evoke the night [...] where the liminal sheaths of black are illuminated by sparks of white light [...] As with Mark Rothko, black is one of the richest colours in Raza’s palette and signifies a state of fulsomeness. However, for both painters, colours plumb the depths and are not simply used for their own sake” (Y. Dalmia, ‘The Subliminal World of Raza’, A Life in Art: S.H. Raza, New Delhi, 2007, p. 197).