.jpg?w=1)
拍品專文
The twilight zone means the meeting point of day and night, of life and death, of love and agony – where everything is seen in a different light.
- Ganesh Pyne, 1985
As a child, Ganesh Pyne lived in an old mansion in Calcutta with his extended family. His clearest memories of the time he spent there include the stories his grandmother regularly told the children on the verandah, the captivating rituals at the Krishna temple across the street, and a neighbor who hosted jatra or folk theater performances in their home. Memories of these experiences ignited Pyne’s imagination, inspiring him to paint masterful pieces imbued with mysticism and fantasy. Later, profound experiences of loss and death during the partition of the Indian subcontinent influenced Pyne to create works describing interstitial worlds, or twilight zones, populated with skeletal forms, masks, puppets, otherworldly animals and floating bodies.
“The shadowy niches of his childhood home, the strange, dark fantasy of his grandmother’s stories, the theatricality of jatra, and his traumatic encounter with death and violence came to besiege his memory, which would imbue the mundane with a mystique and gift him a rich and complex interior landscape to contemplate. Introverted, reclusive, reflective, the artist remained achingly tuned to the tremulous childhood core that shaped his sensibility and proved intrinsic to his art” (R. Datta, ‘Artist of Disquiet and Twilight Mysteries’, The Telegraph, 19 March 2013).
In the present lot, an exquisite and enigmatic painting from 1974 titled Encounter in the Twilight Zone, Pyne use fine crosshatching and patterning in addition to his consummate manipulation of glowing, translucent layers of tempera to portray an uncanny meeting. Set in one of the interstitial worlds the artist conceived, here standard separations of the living from the dead, human from animal and day from night, are tenuous at best.
Naming the chapter on Pyne in her seminal 1996 volume Image and Imagination after this painting, the critic Geeti Sen describes it, noting, “A strong woman, amazon-like, stands on a piece of bone that is shaped into the form of a boat. She crosses an unknown river in a vessel of bones that reminds us of death. On the same riverbank an animal with a gaunt head, its white horns gleaming, drinks in the waters of life. Behind the animal rises a tree stark without leaves, composed in limbs of white bark, with black holes like gaping wounds so that it seems crucified. We sense an eerie, ghostly silence; not the sounds of the birds or of the forest nor the lapping of water. The moon is fading out, its orange reflection still caught in the waters... This is Encounter in the Twilight Zone: where forms dissolve from tangible reality, from the known and the familiar, into the realm of the unknown.”
Sen continues, “On each occasion when we go back to the canvas, there is yet another detail that invites attention. The painting then evolves as a continuously changing language of symbols. The experience is not unlike that of decoding a pictorial alphabet – except that here every form, mysterious and isolated as it seems, composes part of a total universe. It seems easier to dismiss this painting as a thing of subtle beauty and unfathomable mystery. It may seem an unnecessary exercise to attempt to decode it. It bears little relation to reality; but that would be doing it an injustice, since meticulous detail has been worked into the very fabric of the canvas. There is meaning, not merely mystery, although initially it may elude us” (G. Sen, ‘Encounter in the Twilight Zone’, Image and Imagination, Five Contemporary Artists in India, Ahmedabad, 1996, p. 125).
Widely accepted as one of the most definitive paintings in Pyne’s body of work, Encounter in the Twilight Zone speaks of balances and cycles, and simultaneously of the acceptance of uncertainty as a way of life. Drawing from myth and memory, Pyne offers viewers a vessel made from bones and a fantastical skeletal animal alongside a blooming lotus and the statuesque figure of a goddess adorned with living ornaments made of verdant vines. The river in the foreground is at once the Styx, ferrying the dead to the underworld, and the carrier of waters of kshirsagar or the ocean of milk, from which we acquire amrita, the elixir of life. Acknowledging these dichotomies, the artist noted, “True darkness gives one a feeling of insecurity bordering on fear but it also has its own charms, mystery, profundity, a fairyland atmosphere” (Artist statement, ‘Ganesh Pyne in Conversation with Arany Banerjee’, Lalit Kala Contemporary, April 1993).
- Ganesh Pyne, 1985
As a child, Ganesh Pyne lived in an old mansion in Calcutta with his extended family. His clearest memories of the time he spent there include the stories his grandmother regularly told the children on the verandah, the captivating rituals at the Krishna temple across the street, and a neighbor who hosted jatra or folk theater performances in their home. Memories of these experiences ignited Pyne’s imagination, inspiring him to paint masterful pieces imbued with mysticism and fantasy. Later, profound experiences of loss and death during the partition of the Indian subcontinent influenced Pyne to create works describing interstitial worlds, or twilight zones, populated with skeletal forms, masks, puppets, otherworldly animals and floating bodies.
“The shadowy niches of his childhood home, the strange, dark fantasy of his grandmother’s stories, the theatricality of jatra, and his traumatic encounter with death and violence came to besiege his memory, which would imbue the mundane with a mystique and gift him a rich and complex interior landscape to contemplate. Introverted, reclusive, reflective, the artist remained achingly tuned to the tremulous childhood core that shaped his sensibility and proved intrinsic to his art” (R. Datta, ‘Artist of Disquiet and Twilight Mysteries’, The Telegraph, 19 March 2013).
In the present lot, an exquisite and enigmatic painting from 1974 titled Encounter in the Twilight Zone, Pyne use fine crosshatching and patterning in addition to his consummate manipulation of glowing, translucent layers of tempera to portray an uncanny meeting. Set in one of the interstitial worlds the artist conceived, here standard separations of the living from the dead, human from animal and day from night, are tenuous at best.
Naming the chapter on Pyne in her seminal 1996 volume Image and Imagination after this painting, the critic Geeti Sen describes it, noting, “A strong woman, amazon-like, stands on a piece of bone that is shaped into the form of a boat. She crosses an unknown river in a vessel of bones that reminds us of death. On the same riverbank an animal with a gaunt head, its white horns gleaming, drinks in the waters of life. Behind the animal rises a tree stark without leaves, composed in limbs of white bark, with black holes like gaping wounds so that it seems crucified. We sense an eerie, ghostly silence; not the sounds of the birds or of the forest nor the lapping of water. The moon is fading out, its orange reflection still caught in the waters... This is Encounter in the Twilight Zone: where forms dissolve from tangible reality, from the known and the familiar, into the realm of the unknown.”
Sen continues, “On each occasion when we go back to the canvas, there is yet another detail that invites attention. The painting then evolves as a continuously changing language of symbols. The experience is not unlike that of decoding a pictorial alphabet – except that here every form, mysterious and isolated as it seems, composes part of a total universe. It seems easier to dismiss this painting as a thing of subtle beauty and unfathomable mystery. It may seem an unnecessary exercise to attempt to decode it. It bears little relation to reality; but that would be doing it an injustice, since meticulous detail has been worked into the very fabric of the canvas. There is meaning, not merely mystery, although initially it may elude us” (G. Sen, ‘Encounter in the Twilight Zone’, Image and Imagination, Five Contemporary Artists in India, Ahmedabad, 1996, p. 125).
Widely accepted as one of the most definitive paintings in Pyne’s body of work, Encounter in the Twilight Zone speaks of balances and cycles, and simultaneously of the acceptance of uncertainty as a way of life. Drawing from myth and memory, Pyne offers viewers a vessel made from bones and a fantastical skeletal animal alongside a blooming lotus and the statuesque figure of a goddess adorned with living ornaments made of verdant vines. The river in the foreground is at once the Styx, ferrying the dead to the underworld, and the carrier of waters of kshirsagar or the ocean of milk, from which we acquire amrita, the elixir of life. Acknowledging these dichotomies, the artist noted, “True darkness gives one a feeling of insecurity bordering on fear but it also has its own charms, mystery, profundity, a fairyland atmosphere” (Artist statement, ‘Ganesh Pyne in Conversation with Arany Banerjee’, Lalit Kala Contemporary, April 1993).