Untitled (Townscape)

"The 1960s transiting among urban hubs in three continents, imaginative natural landscapes became one of Padamsee's central artistic projects during that decade [...] At this time, he began an earnest investigation of light, colour, and form through village landscape studies, following a classically French tradition that included Lorrain and Corot to Cézanne [...] Through these studies, Padamsee began to develop his own distinct idiom [...] with individual houses and churches reduced to opaque squares and triangles, even as the composite images would remain referential and legible as a landscape [...] skeletons of bustling crowded settlements (like Rouen) as of those sites hollowed of houses where large swathes of colour intimate a densely thick atmosphere." (B. Citron, 'Akbar Padamsee's Artistic "Landscape" of the 1960s', Work in Language, Mumbai, 2010 pp. 195-197)

In 1960 following the acclaimed solo exhibition of his Grey works at Gallery 59 in Bombay, Akbar Padamsee returned to Paris, where he would depart dramatically from his grey monochromatic pallet. For Padamsee, the genre of landscape represented a mechanism for experimentation and expression. He departs from empirical representation in favor of something more perceptual and atmospheric. The angular corniced houses and stretching steeples form flattened architectonic cubist forms. The non-naturalistic pallet of warm and earthy hues, impress an experiential and sensory semblance of a French town. Deliberately nebulous, this radiant townscape, dances between representation and abstraction.