Artist Sayed Haider Raza, who would have turned 100 this year, lives through his works even today. By Uma Nair
At the art gallery, Akar Prakar, there are canvasses created by Sayed Haider Raza in his last few years. They are a testimony to his love for painting and clearly prove that he was a pilgrim of deeper intensities in geometry and symbolism.
Amongst all the works in this seminal show, it is Shantibindu that strikes a deep chord in this critic. In a conversation to me in 2004 on the eve of his 85th birthday, he said, “My bindu is primarily a philosophical expression, an act of faith in the infinite, an affirmation of spirituality. When I sit down in front of one of my paintings to contemplate, I suddenly feel a great expansion of the spirit, I feel like a man liberated from the wants of material desires, a man who belongs to the vastness of the present and past.
Shantibindu tryst
Raza Sahib’s tryst with the Shantibindu began in the 1990s. The black orb that went beyond the black sun into infinite realms and references gave way to a set of concentric geometric circles that formed a suffused ethereal Bindu, which looked like a symphony of peace created for a vista of harmonies. For Raza, the recurring Bindu became a new corollary on canvas with infinite variations.
The Shantibindu for Raza was an exemplification of Purusha Prakriti principles. These principles dwell on the infinite, on dualities and deeper philosophies of the inner spirit and outer realities of nature’s relativity. Born of a meditative mooring, his bindu was the device of a spiritual firmament. The softly nuanced pastel toned circles resonate with a harmony emanating from the epicentre. Their terracotta and soft tinted colour tones form an elegant exemplar. The Shantibindu became an iconic nucleus in which the central core was an energy that created a ritual.
Nostalgia and memory
Looking at this show highlights the power and prowess of his paintings that come rushing into human memory. His early landscapes of European cities, churches, glowing ember like landscapes that spoke of his passion for nocturnes, his midnight moorings of works like Tapovan, La Terre, Saurashtra, Rajasthan and his Shantibindu series, all become a part of his pilgrimage of painting. India’s avant grade artist who combined expressionist brushwork with the symbolism of geometry woven into personal memory lives through his works.