Untitled

Sayed Haider Raza painted this landscape in 1977, during a decade where the artist increasingly embraced the symbolic power of color. Discernible figurative elements of the landscape seen in his works of the 1950s dissolved in the following decade, and by the early 1970s were replaced by expressionistic explosions of pigment. In the 1970s, Raza revealed an increasingly sophisticated use of brushstroke and palette that denoted location, emotion and spirituality in place of tangible forms. His gestural brushwork was painterly not in the sense of texture, but in further expressing the complex emotions Raza associated with the landscape, particularly that of his childhood home in Central India. “Physical location did not necessarily mean a spiritual and creative dislocation […] For him hereafter art was to be his home, reconstructed through memory, resonance and imagination. It was soon to be also his spiritual haven, a space where he could connect with the infinite, the limitless and the timeless” (A. Vajpeyi, A Life in Art: Raza, New Delhi, 2007, p. 98).

While Raza spent close to sixty years of his artistic career living in France, India and specifically the Indian landscape persisted and resonated within him and his practice. Geeta Kapur discusses this resonant longing, writing, “[…] nostalgia perhaps of the land he left behind when he settled in Paris, S.H. Raza opted wholeheartedly for the rhapsodic, nature based abstraction. The nostalgia was fierce and the earth was a conflagration of colours” (G. Kapur, ‘Excerpt from different chapters of Contemporary Indian Artists,’ Understanding Raza: Many Ways of Looking at a Master, New Delhi, p. 172). This painting perfectly presents the powerful emotive longing for the Indian landscape that Raza so acutely felt and articulated in the 1970s. As such, this picture is both an homage to and the personification of his homeland.