.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The reclusive Vasudeo S. Gaitonde disdained popular attempts to classify his work as abstractionist. The deconstruction of representation seen in his use of symbols, calligraphic elements and hieroglyphs, served as a bridge into Gaitonde's later fully abstracted paintings, as his concurrent study of Zen Buddhism began to further influence his thought processes and his art. Using both a roller and a palette knife, he scrupulously manipulates and mixes different mediums on the canvas, coordinating spontaneous reactions with such precision that they seem to deny the notion of accidental elements. His subsequent work is multi-layered and filled with complexity that in essence is an experimentation with the genre of painting itself. The work seems to straddle the duality between density and weightlessness and between form and formlessness producing a tension between the translucent surface and almost primordial background.
The artist refers to his work as [...] a play of light and color [...] Every painting has a seed which germinates in the next painting. A painting is not limited to one canvas. I go on adding an element and that's how it evolves [...] There is a kind of metamorphosis in every canvas and the metamorphosis never ends. (M. Menezes, 'The Meditative Brushstroke', Art India, vol. 3, issue 3, July - September 1998, Mumbai, p. 69)
Like the Zen philosophy and ancient calligraphy, Gaitonde's work has an inherent structure and control in the midst of its seemingly free-flowing stream of consciousness. Traversing the delicate balance of light, texture, color, and space, Gaitonde's paintings elicit new discoveries with each viewing.
"[...] [Gaitonde] deals with the canvas itself as an arena of space, so that filling it, lighting it up, forcing it to yield a moment of revelation akin to music that becomes a manifold challenge. And talking of music, this is exactly how I visualise Gaitonde's painting, tuning up his canvas, working on the strings susceptible to two complementary disciplines and creating a sound which is unique, complete and spontaneous." (D. Nadkarni, Gaitonde, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1983, unpaginated)
Gaitonde traveled to New York on a Rockefeller scholarship in 1964. Here he was exposed to the epicenter of artistic innovation of the time. By 1973 he has established himself as a fully mature artist and arrived at a profoundly personal aesthetic. The philosophy of Conceptual art appealed to Gaitonde's own sensibilities.
Gaitonde was not a prolific painter, only completing about five or six paintings a year, as he devoted vast amounts of energy and patience to the complex layers of each of his deeply considered compositions. Despite the time required in the production of his works Gaitonde was adamant that the emotive and conceptual half-life of his works captured was far more transient. The viewer must engage with this moment and through their own consciousness create something new and profoundly personal.
This painting on offer is rendered in restrained brooding blues and greens. The multiple horizons of horizontal lines anchor the eye offering a formal structure amid an ocean of contemplation. These lines almost like the rulings in a notebook, a guiding grid run through the canvas and forms, hues and colors emerge as if we are to read between the lines.
The artist refers to his work as [...] a play of light and color [...] Every painting has a seed which germinates in the next painting. A painting is not limited to one canvas. I go on adding an element and that's how it evolves [...] There is a kind of metamorphosis in every canvas and the metamorphosis never ends. (M. Menezes, 'The Meditative Brushstroke', Art India, vol. 3, issue 3, July - September 1998, Mumbai, p. 69)
Like the Zen philosophy and ancient calligraphy, Gaitonde's work has an inherent structure and control in the midst of its seemingly free-flowing stream of consciousness. Traversing the delicate balance of light, texture, color, and space, Gaitonde's paintings elicit new discoveries with each viewing.
"[...] [Gaitonde] deals with the canvas itself as an arena of space, so that filling it, lighting it up, forcing it to yield a moment of revelation akin to music that becomes a manifold challenge. And talking of music, this is exactly how I visualise Gaitonde's painting, tuning up his canvas, working on the strings susceptible to two complementary disciplines and creating a sound which is unique, complete and spontaneous." (D. Nadkarni, Gaitonde, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1983, unpaginated)
Gaitonde traveled to New York on a Rockefeller scholarship in 1964. Here he was exposed to the epicenter of artistic innovation of the time. By 1973 he has established himself as a fully mature artist and arrived at a profoundly personal aesthetic. The philosophy of Conceptual art appealed to Gaitonde's own sensibilities.
Gaitonde was not a prolific painter, only completing about five or six paintings a year, as he devoted vast amounts of energy and patience to the complex layers of each of his deeply considered compositions. Despite the time required in the production of his works Gaitonde was adamant that the emotive and conceptual half-life of his works captured was far more transient. The viewer must engage with this moment and through their own consciousness create something new and profoundly personal.
This painting on offer is rendered in restrained brooding blues and greens. The multiple horizons of horizontal lines anchor the eye offering a formal structure amid an ocean of contemplation. These lines almost like the rulings in a notebook, a guiding grid run through the canvas and forms, hues and colors emerge as if we are to read between the lines.