.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
No longer am I satisfied with the juxtaposition of planes, the search for rare colour, the almost total denigration of the unpremeditated. It is the intangible which is now my goal. Space and light, and an element of mystery begin to permeate my canvases. Emotions seek a new release in what I hope will become a permanent synthesis of heart and mind.
- Jehangir Sabavala, 1964
Jehangir Sabavala’s work frequently explores the relationship between man and the sublime power of the natural world, almost always ceding power to his beautiful and turbulent version of the latter. Combining elements of Romanticism, as seen in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and Joseph Mallard William Turner, with his unique interpretation of Cubism, the artist’s work seamlessly merges form and content in paintings like Mirage to successfully convey the majesty of nature and our insignificance in the face of its forces.
Painted in 1966, this ethereal landscape with its subtly graded wedges of color is an exemplar of one of the most significant turning points in Sabavala’s oeuvre. It was during the early 1960s, a period of intense clarification in Jehangir Sabavala’s work, that the artist defined and focused the language that would make his paintings “site[s] of epiphany” that transcended common genres and motifs. Describing this change, the artist’s friend and biographer Ranjit Hoskote notes, “Between 1961 and 1964, Sabavala attempted to break away from the suffocating formality of Synthetic Cubism; and in this, he found a remedial alternative in the work of Lyonel Feininger […] ‘Through Feininger’s pure, precise and yet very delicate and personal renderings of cloud and boat and sea, I discovered the joys of extending form into the beauty and clarity of light. I became interested in the source of light, its direction, its effect. Through these experiments, gradually, my work changed’” (R. Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai, 2005, pp. 89, 95).
In Mirage, Sabavala tantalizes viewers with a hazy apparition, witnessed by two shrouded seated figures in the foreground. Shimmering above the sandy surface of an arid desert, in front of a few dunes on the distant horizon, we cannot tell whether this dark form is human or animal, real or illusory. Like the silvery surface it appears to glide on, we are forced to wonder if it is a figment of imagination, dreamt up by two weary travelers, or the destination of their journey across the sands. Writing about this period in Sabavala’s oeuvre, Hoskote notes, “At the level of immediate sensation, we are struck by the obvious physical beauty of the painting as product, process and parallel reality. And as we enter Sabavala’s spaces, with trepidation, to inhabit them, we apprehend their disquieting melancholy and their restful tranquility; the paradox underscores the artist’s uncertainty about his place in the universe, his exploration of an infinity that can be measured only in mirages, illuminated only through mystery” (R. Hoskote, Ibid., 2005, p. 109).
With no explicit location in space or time, the figures in this painting perhaps voice the artist’s own quest for the elusive goal of perfection. “These intermittent apparitions record the seizure, the ecstasy, before it vanishes; they attest to the artist’s continuing struggle with the enslaving forces of history and memory, his passionate engagement with the emancipatory forces of nature and desire. Symbols of passage and augury, they shuttle between the meridian radiance of the painted frame and the vespertine umbra of time; they cast a challenge in the face of mortality” (R. Hoskote, Ibid., 2005, p. 106).
- Jehangir Sabavala, 1964
Jehangir Sabavala’s work frequently explores the relationship between man and the sublime power of the natural world, almost always ceding power to his beautiful and turbulent version of the latter. Combining elements of Romanticism, as seen in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and Joseph Mallard William Turner, with his unique interpretation of Cubism, the artist’s work seamlessly merges form and content in paintings like Mirage to successfully convey the majesty of nature and our insignificance in the face of its forces.
Painted in 1966, this ethereal landscape with its subtly graded wedges of color is an exemplar of one of the most significant turning points in Sabavala’s oeuvre. It was during the early 1960s, a period of intense clarification in Jehangir Sabavala’s work, that the artist defined and focused the language that would make his paintings “site[s] of epiphany” that transcended common genres and motifs. Describing this change, the artist’s friend and biographer Ranjit Hoskote notes, “Between 1961 and 1964, Sabavala attempted to break away from the suffocating formality of Synthetic Cubism; and in this, he found a remedial alternative in the work of Lyonel Feininger […] ‘Through Feininger’s pure, precise and yet very delicate and personal renderings of cloud and boat and sea, I discovered the joys of extending form into the beauty and clarity of light. I became interested in the source of light, its direction, its effect. Through these experiments, gradually, my work changed’” (R. Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai, 2005, pp. 89, 95).
In Mirage, Sabavala tantalizes viewers with a hazy apparition, witnessed by two shrouded seated figures in the foreground. Shimmering above the sandy surface of an arid desert, in front of a few dunes on the distant horizon, we cannot tell whether this dark form is human or animal, real or illusory. Like the silvery surface it appears to glide on, we are forced to wonder if it is a figment of imagination, dreamt up by two weary travelers, or the destination of their journey across the sands. Writing about this period in Sabavala’s oeuvre, Hoskote notes, “At the level of immediate sensation, we are struck by the obvious physical beauty of the painting as product, process and parallel reality. And as we enter Sabavala’s spaces, with trepidation, to inhabit them, we apprehend their disquieting melancholy and their restful tranquility; the paradox underscores the artist’s uncertainty about his place in the universe, his exploration of an infinity that can be measured only in mirages, illuminated only through mystery” (R. Hoskote, Ibid., 2005, p. 109).
With no explicit location in space or time, the figures in this painting perhaps voice the artist’s own quest for the elusive goal of perfection. “These intermittent apparitions record the seizure, the ecstasy, before it vanishes; they attest to the artist’s continuing struggle with the enslaving forces of history and memory, his passionate engagement with the emancipatory forces of nature and desire. Symbols of passage and augury, they shuttle between the meridian radiance of the painted frame and the vespertine umbra of time; they cast a challenge in the face of mortality” (R. Hoskote, Ibid., 2005, p. 106).