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拍品专文
Located between the real and the ideal, the landscapes Jehangir Sabavala creates are intuitive and timeless. Paintings like this one, part of a series of works that the artist undertook in the late 1980s, are carefully planned and constructed based on meticulous linear schema and highly nuanced colour planes comprising several minutely graded ‘broken tones’. The end results are images of land, sea and sky unlike any others, at once restrained and emotionally charged.
In this mysteriously titled series of works, the interplay between light and shadow is particularly important. “Light does not simply fall, in these paintings; the light slants, slides, stipples, slopes, and points up peaks. The witnessing illumination plays a pivotal role: it identifies the edges of Sabavala’s dramas of distance and longing; it plays chess with its Manichean rival, the gathering darkness, the creeping shadow. Sudden disclosure, gradual realisation: the light in these paintings is unpredictable, plays tricks on the eyes. Most often, it seems to bear testimony to the fragility of life in a hostile terrain, the plangency of vision in an atmosphere frought with violence.” (R. Hoskote, Recent Paintings, Jehangir Sabavala, Chennai, 1993, unpaginated)
Underlining the complexity of this achievement in Sabavala’s paintings, Richard Lannoy notes, “The technique which he evolved quite slowly [...] is based on transparency, glazes, effects of inwardly glowing objects obtained by exploiting the white of the canvas as a kind of backlighting. This gives the surface of his paintings a glistening crystalline sheen. The individual hues and tones, being mixed separately in subtly but cleanly differentiated gradations, impart to the picture surface a cleanliness and clarity of hue which is very unusual. [...] His mastery of light effects is based on a lifetime’s study of natural Indian light without resort to banal naturalism.” (R. Lannoy, ‘The Paradoxical Alliance’, Pilgrim, Exile, Sorcerer - The Painterly Evolution of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai, 1998, p. 16)
In this mysteriously titled series of works, the interplay between light and shadow is particularly important. “Light does not simply fall, in these paintings; the light slants, slides, stipples, slopes, and points up peaks. The witnessing illumination plays a pivotal role: it identifies the edges of Sabavala’s dramas of distance and longing; it plays chess with its Manichean rival, the gathering darkness, the creeping shadow. Sudden disclosure, gradual realisation: the light in these paintings is unpredictable, plays tricks on the eyes. Most often, it seems to bear testimony to the fragility of life in a hostile terrain, the plangency of vision in an atmosphere frought with violence.” (R. Hoskote, Recent Paintings, Jehangir Sabavala, Chennai, 1993, unpaginated)
Underlining the complexity of this achievement in Sabavala’s paintings, Richard Lannoy notes, “The technique which he evolved quite slowly [...] is based on transparency, glazes, effects of inwardly glowing objects obtained by exploiting the white of the canvas as a kind of backlighting. This gives the surface of his paintings a glistening crystalline sheen. The individual hues and tones, being mixed separately in subtly but cleanly differentiated gradations, impart to the picture surface a cleanliness and clarity of hue which is very unusual. [...] His mastery of light effects is based on a lifetime’s study of natural Indian light without resort to banal naturalism.” (R. Lannoy, ‘The Paradoxical Alliance’, Pilgrim, Exile, Sorcerer - The Painterly Evolution of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai, 1998, p. 16)