SH Raza’s Antima an epic odyssey

At Shridharani Gallery in Delhi the Raza Foundation presents an epic odyssey in the 68 late works of Sayed Haider Raza  in his epic last years, amidst a meditative march through the spirit of a Modern master of Indian contemporary art.

The moment you walk in you are wrapped in the notes  of harmony, combined with the basic elements of nature and the universe. According to scholar, poet, author, art critic  and long time friend Ashok Vajpeyi, Raza  saw through his revisitation in the last years (5 and half years in India ) , a dynamic power that united all the elements of experience and memory, even as renderings  coalesced , merged, and gave birth to new works like Swasti and Tree.

Panchatatva and mysteries

In his Swasti we see a painter of geometry and symbolism who breathed within his strokes the sojourn of both  air and fire, and the ethos and essence of  something comprehensible pertaining to  particular mysteries of the consonance of the cosmos. Colour is the key to his contemplative sojourn. And the elements he chooses are his insignia of intensity.

There is  such personal ,magic power in this work that  makes Raza a unique figure within the School of Paris as well as the art historical canon of Indian contemporary art. Raza’s style of abstraction transforms concrete forms into flowing and crystalline essence, the visible forces and elements that are hidden in nature  remained his source of inspiration  and he linked the natural world closely to the cosmology of the process of both transmutation and rebirth.

Landscapes in flashback

A number of works are a revisitation of his older landscapes done in Europe, wherein a painting becomes the instant expression of his traditional  philosophy of aesthetics.

Indeed we see the genesis of  sensory experience, which perceives an objective ‘ nature in its primal form (la nature naturée).’ Over the years Raza created his own insignia of  a subjective intervention of individual thoughts and feelings., and injected his own “aesthetic intuition” into the creative act, to produce what  French Professor Annie Montaut termed , ‘ created nature (la nature naturante).’

Raza told me in a conversation that Jena Romanticism and the German Idealism philosopher Friedrich W. J. Schelling,  discussing the relationship between art and nature,  believed  that ‘ beauty is the infinite, expressed within finite images.’ For Raza direct impressions and his own reflections became the embodiment of linking nature and the soul of man.

Within the chromatics of colour we sense a feeling of the infinite, an evocation of transcending space and time. According to his long friend the critic Ashok Vajpeyi, his landscapes  are the product of a sharp, sensitive, and richly poetic awareness, reaching far back into his long-buried memories of ‘ a lifetime of  travels,’ that are eventually sublimated onto his canvases. The seemingly infinite memory flow on his canvases turns space and time into a frozen instant of eternity with the staccato strokes.

Recreation of a poetic landscape 

Playing with  refined colour and light source are his tender and passionate blues that burn into your inner recesses. Raza’s passion for the sky and sea and the atmospherics led to  his use of the magnificent flow of colour. His colour palette  bursts into lays of blue hues in all varieties, dark, bright, heavy or light. Density and depth were his favourite intensities and he played his pliant brush to recreate these even in the last days of weakness.

At the Shridharani it is his monochromatic minimalist set of strokes on canvas that reveal a revolutionary way of visually experiencing nature in his own  painting practices, in which only minimal strokes  were added. This series of 68 works displayed in avant garde  splendour recaptures for us the soul of the human, visual experience.

Tanmay 

The last of the Shantibindu series is Tanmay that this critic saw being finished and left to dry in the summer of 2015. The chaos and destruction of a divided world of superpowers led Raza to think more deeply about  interwoven cadences of light, within the black Bindu that  was now disturbed and no longer stable but filled with broken fragments of grey within the sooty black. Indeed within the Bindu  we see the veteran’s  skilful way of expressing various aspects of light and the darkness within.Raza was a great believer in the truth that abstract connections can only be sensed or felt.

Pliant brush 

The viewer is rewarded with Raza’s flowing lines with sweeps of his broad/thin brushes,  the broad background of darkness and light both roam around the canvases as well as paper works. A set of brisk staccato stroked small canvasses tell us of his love for the minimal in times of deep reverie. Sometimes a gently shimmering light seeps from the central area of the composition, as in Tree , breaking through the reserved, deep ochre tones stillness. There is exquisite placement of light sources and dramatic tones of  a subtle  materialisation of both depth and atmosphere. The warm-toned hues develop into flickering shades that spread its deep mysterious light through the endless universe he  creates with  visual effects. Interwoven streaks of light and shadow unfold a chain of shades  exemplifying  the use of the vertical  perspective.

Even in his last years he was expressing depth and silent truths , endlessly extended distance.We are left pondering over his unspoken poetic sensibilities in the world he left behind. Born on 22nd February 1922, this year marks 103 years of this Indian master extraordinaire and this exhibition is more than a commemoration for art lovers in India. Janam Din Mubarak  Raza Sir.

IMAGES:  RAZA FOUNDATION