Signed and dated 'Raza '81' (lower right)
Further signed, titled dated and inscribed in French and English 'Raza / 1981 / 50 x 50 cm / "Le Réve" / Acrylique sur toile’ and titled 'Svapna' in Hindi (on the reverse)

PROVENANCE
Artiana / Sale 1802 / Lot 20 / South Asian Art / Dubai / 6 - 10 December 2018
Private collection, Dubai

LOT ESSAY
Before the acclaimed Bindu surfaced in Sayed Haider Raza’s work, he began as a landscape artist. His earliest works were composed of expressionist landscapes which gradually evolved to rigid and geometric representations of French towns and villages following his move to Paris.

In the early 1960s, Raza’s exposure to the New York School of painters and to Abstract Expressionism marked a shift in his paintings. He began to integrate vital elements of his Indian heritage and memories into his paintings. Rooted in his childhood memories of life growing up close to the dense forest of Madhya Pradesh, his work fused symbolic abstract forms into a powerful expression of mood and atmosphere of the Indian night. Raza’s theme remained on landscape but his lines began to blur, reflecting his engagement with the non-representational. Colour began to dominate his work, especially black, which for him was the mother colour from which other hues were born. Majority of the painting from this period was emerging from darkness, crepuscular and almost hallucinatory. He started showing the more intangible aspects of a landscape rather than mimetic representation. Instead of the physical attributes, he deftly manipulated colour and light to focus on the emotion a scene evoked.

The present lot represents the culmination of this period of experimentation in S.H Raza’s career, he masterfully used an emotive, largely monochromatic palette to recreate the elusive mood brought on by the descent of night. The aura of the night is suggested by establishing a most luminous indigo, light enough for the black of the night to be defined, yet dark enough to establish mystique, and for the white to contrast against it. There is no apparent source of light yet the texture of the paint lends subtle luminescence, emphasizing the darkness and their allusion to the memory and the mood.