Perhaps The Oberoi isn’t quite the place one would visit to see an art exhibition, but Saffronart’s Gallery debut with Gaitonde is a treasure trove of masterpieces. Specifically because he was India’s abstract master. Only after his death did art aficionados recognise him as India’s Contemporary arts Buddha. The self exiled Gaitonde who spoke less, and was seen even lesser, was indeed the abstract genius who wove silence into his painterly ruminations. In 1947, he was on the fringe of the “Progressive Artists Group”, with a broad awareness to break away from the past, from a manner oppressively weighed down by colonial academism and clichéd Indianess, to pave the way for an international idiom.
“My entire outlook changed when I came to know that the Chinese have no epics to boast of, for the simple reason that an epic covers a long period of time and it is basically wrong to say, for instance, that any age can be heroic, any abstract feeling — love, courage etc — can be valid only for a given moment. One is not in love eternally, even if the feeling is there. The ecstasy of the moment cannot be stretched over a long period,” said Gaitonde in a conversation to S.G.Vasudev in 1983.
This show mirrors a distinct and different examination of colour progression: some of them subtle, some meditations on darkness, others, a delicate mix of sublime shades of sandhya (sunset). The break-down of representation seen in his use of symbols, calligraphic elements and hieroglyphs, served as a bridge to Gaitonde’s later, fully abstracted paintings, as his concurrent study of Zen Buddhism began to further influence his thought processes and his art. Techniques became his mainstay of ingenuity. Using both a roller and a palette knife, he scrupulously manipulated and mixed different mediums on the canvas, coordinated spontaneous reactions with such precision that they seemed to deny the notion of accidental elements. His subsequent work was multilayered, filled with complexity which formed its very essence.
In the imperative to span and leap the void of formlessness in space, Gaitonde seemed to resist gravity to create crucibles that would capture the cusp in the undulation of absorption. In the few, seminal works in this show, elemental planes merge into a confluence and spread over the surface of a warp. Colour becomes the lingua franca of discretion as it flows into the continuum of cohesive collaboration.
In a light-toned subliminal essenced work, it is as if Vasudev Gaitonde looked at the sky. When it looked back, the door to abstraction swung open. Structure for Gaitonde runs in hidden currents, its softened edges provokes the ambiguities of a vanishing dynamics in time. To create a work of this merit, to find metaphors in the meandering of meditation, ruminations have to be realised in inner meanings.
When layers of colourative phenomena get buried beneath sheathes of striations, they become like secretive treasures that transmit the whispers of wind and gravity. In Gaitonde’s hands it seemed as if colour worked more like a ghost behind the scenes. This secret ambition to translate the transference of the real and animate in the landscape to the unreal and the abstract, resonates most readily with the act of priming the imagination. Sometimes structure and metaphor in the abstract domain can work like two poles of a magnet, each field of thought flowing into the other.
The second set of works is indeed one that brings back the debate that tries to distinguish between what we “see” or what we “look at”. While “looking” infers a desire to study and make a critical comment, to “see” this work of Gaitonde is to receive an image. The hint of outward contours in this work that embraces Basant brings back an imperative of rustic geometry and pattern mixed with instinct and intuition, to bring us the colour field that seems to have been sprinkled with sindoor. There is indeed this intangible concept underlying form, more to do with Gaitonde’s own brand of creativity rather than his process of visualisation.
Trapped in its own layers of outward and inward resonance, this work reverberates with the hints of harmony in its own underlying depths, and while this harmony lets out an incessant lyricism, it also emanates the power of synthesis and allies colour to form. Strangely, it is the meditative moorings that trap the tenets of certainty, it is the deeper instincts of mysticism that unravel myriad connectives of the kinetics of colour.
Perhaps, above all, is the textural terrain that is reflected in the interplay of zones, and in that quest of the quiet island of inward leanings, colour weaves and knits itself into the timeless vibrations that yield revelations of a Zen master, who only wants to echo the silent surfaces that oscillate between being and nothingness.
“A quiet man and a painter of the quiet reaches of the imagination,” said Tyeb Mehta about him in 2005, and this defines Gaitonde best. Tyeb remembered him as an intellectual, literally simmering with some unexplored thought. Conceptually, he never considered himself an abstract painter and was averse to being named one. “In fact, he asserted that there is no such thing as abstract painting,” said Tyeb, “Instead, he referred to his work as ‘non-objective’. In the parallels of the external and internal experience, the seen and the unseen, the artistic insight that propels the evolution of colour in space is like an ignition that takes place in the microcosm of the mind. Innate connections emerge; the canvas transcends the act of creation to become a spiritual dedication that floats like a reverie on a wall. Looking at a Gaitonde you know that abstraction goes beyond colour and form.
“Color itself is form and, at the other end, the canvas itself is form. When the mind is attuned to a state of high receptivity to absorb all, then nothing can leave behind a single impress,” said he. Gaitonde’s work thus reverberates to a silence that is sound, to a rhythm above and beyond harmony, to an awareness beyond definition. This show in Delhi by Saffronart comes at a time when Indian contemporary art needs to recall its Modern Masters. This collection reflects the impeccable connoisseurship of India’s most revered collectors.