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26
27
Through the 1970s and 1980s, Raza explored the emotional
content of colours and landscape, seen most strikingly in
his
La Terre
series from this period. Raza held a deep fear
and fascination for the dense forests of Kakaiya, and this
feeling intensified at night. He once recalled, “Nights in the
forests were hallucinating; sometimes the only humanizing
influence was the dancing of the Gond tribes. Daybreak
brought back a sentiment of security and well‒being.
On market day, under the radiant sun, the village was a
fairyland of colours. And then, the night again. Even today I
find that these two aspects of my life dominate me and are
an integral part of my paintings.” (Artist quoted in Jacques
Lassaigne,
Raza Anthology 1980‒90
,
Mumbai: Chemould
Publications and Arts, 1991)
Large format canvases such as the present lot, reveal this
consideration of the role of darkness amid colour and life.
The interplay of red and black reveals a struggle for balance
between Raza’s contrasting feelings of safety and fear about
his native land. While the red is confined within distinct
structures, the looming blackness traps it with an almost
menacing presence. Black, as a colour, held immense
potential for Raza, in that it was the “mother colour” from
which all other colours emerged. Paintings that resulted
from his meditations on black were powerful evocations of
the mysteries of the forest and of the night.
According to art critic Rudy von Leyden, for Raza, “Painting
acts itself out as a natural force, struggling in darkness,
breaking into light, shivering in cold, burning in heat, trying
to find form and yet dissolving into chaos... the work of
art emerges as an entity of vibrating power, metamorphosis
incarnate, unchangeable and ever changing like the forces
of nature reflected in the human mind.” (Rudy von Leyden,
“Metamorphosis,”
Raza
, Mumbai: Chemould Publications
and Arts, 1985)
La Terre
, 1986
Saffronart, New Delhi, 4 September 2014, lot 15
Sold for INR 8.17 crores ($1.36 million)
La Terre
, 1973
Christie's, New York, 18 March 2014, lot 25
Sold for $3.1 million
S H Raza: A Retrospective
, New York: Saffronart and Berkeley Square,
21 September – 31 October 2007
© S H Raza Foundation