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Lot Essay
Akbar Padamsee's Metascapes, begun in 1970, represent his long involvement with the theme of the landscape. As the term Metascape suggests, Padamsee is concerned with the mythic or archetypal landscape that is expressed visually by a stringent ordering of timeless elements, such as the earth, the sun, and the moon, in a temporal space.
"The idea of using the (sun and) the moon in my metascapes originated when I was reading the introductory stanzas to the Abhijnana Sakuntalam, where Kalidasa speaks of the eight visible forms of Lord Siva without mentioning them by name. For instance, he suggests the sun and the moon as the controllers of time. It is by this process that the artist deals with reality; not by describing or naming, but by a superimposition of secondary and tertiary semantic planes upon the pictorial sign."
The use of a bold palette complements his choice of landscape as subject. The colors evoke a sense of movement in an unmoving space. Padamsee states, "...colors expand and contract, colors travel on the surface of the static painting...color trajectory is strategy...A colorist needs to master the art of silencing some colors, so as to render others eloquent." (Akbar Padamsee, India Myth and Reality, Aspects of Modern Indian Art, Oxford, 1982, p. 17)
For a similar painting, see, 'Problems of Identity', Lalit Kala Contemporary 30, September 1980, fig. 43.
"The idea of using the (sun and) the moon in my metascapes originated when I was reading the introductory stanzas to the Abhijnana Sakuntalam, where Kalidasa speaks of the eight visible forms of Lord Siva without mentioning them by name. For instance, he suggests the sun and the moon as the controllers of time. It is by this process that the artist deals with reality; not by describing or naming, but by a superimposition of secondary and tertiary semantic planes upon the pictorial sign."
The use of a bold palette complements his choice of landscape as subject. The colors evoke a sense of movement in an unmoving space. Padamsee states, "...colors expand and contract, colors travel on the surface of the static painting...color trajectory is strategy...A colorist needs to master the art of silencing some colors, so as to render others eloquent." (Akbar Padamsee, India Myth and Reality, Aspects of Modern Indian Art, Oxford, 1982, p. 17)
For a similar painting, see, 'Problems of Identity', Lalit Kala Contemporary 30, September 1980, fig. 43.