Jehangir Sabavala (b. 1922)

Ranjit Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting, The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai, 2005, p. 171 illustrated

Canvas in good overall condition. Colours of original are slightly richer especially in the blue tones, than in the catalogue illustration.
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Ranjit Hoskote has noted that Sabavala remains entranced by the memory of a hypnotic object that used to sit on his grandfather's desk.  The object was a paperweight formed from four glass spheres that reflected and refracted the light.  Looking through the talisman Sabavala would see 'a jigsaw-puzzle of saxe blue sky and waving frond, multi-coloured garden and crested sea.' Although it would be a mistake to compress an artist's inspiration into a single moment, it is clear that the memory of the refracted and splintered forms of the universe as seen through the spheres has been a catalyst for the style and compositional forms produced by Sabavala over his long career. Yet his painterly approach, based on his rigorous understanding of Cubism, has been endlessly refined and reworked to create images of deceptive simplicity.

'I observe an object or a landscape to which I intuitively respond.  I analyze it to find the myriad tones that make up its color.  I may see ten or more shades in the grey-blue or slate jade of the sea on a particular day. I make notes of these nuances - of the time of day the mood, the season - and they enter my paintings in combinations that are unpredictable.' (Ranjit Hoskote, Sabavala: Pilgrim, Exile, Sorcerer, Bombay, 1998).

The landscape has been a constant feature throughout Sabavala's career. Though it has been interwoven with other phases that include academic portraiture, still lifes, and religious compositions, the landscape remains central. There appears to be an obssession with water, as sea, as river, as lake or even as cloud. 'The river as always serves Sabavala both as a visual excitement and as an image of the passage of time, the self and the world growing older, pursuing a strict course yet performing variations on destiny...In three versions of The Gorge (all painted in 2004) the river is an animal of powerful moods; Sabavala's handling is not Cubist here, so much as it is suggestive of the mediaeval German Zackenstil, a dialogue between angularity and the arabesque.  Gorge I is the river as a form of electricity, darting and trilling, working riffs of its own startling melody; in Gorge II the river purls between mountains, isolating a rocky castle island;  in the Bridge, [the current lot] a sleek bridge has tamed the riverine landscape and the island, too has been domesticated by houses.' (Ranjit Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting, The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai, 2005, p. 171).