Art Musings is proud to present a solo exhibition of Padma Shree S H Raza entitled Vistaar. In the course of a career spanning nearly seven decades, Raza has dedicated himself to a quest for vital forms that convey his earliest memories of landscape and cosmic expanse, language and silence. The circle or ‘Bindu’ has become more of an icon, sacred in its symbolism, and placing his work in an Indian context. To Raza, painting is akin to the meditative practice of japa, the fully –engaged repetition of a mantra, until it is deepened and concentrated into a pathway of energy. Working with basic forms such as the point, the circle and the concentric diagram, Raza has pursued a pictorial japa as a means of approaching the deep sources of the self. His art lends itself to such a quest for intensity: the compass of its scale meets the eye in an intimate encounter; the linear stroke, the chromatic pitch and the unspoken sound explode, not at the distance set by the frame, but within our minds. In his favoured vocabulary of motifs, alongside cosmic references as the bija or seed, the bindu or focal source, the divya-chakshu or inner eye, and the kalpa vriksha or cosmic tree, the artist also dwells on the twinned nagas, the interlocking serpents emblematic of regeneration, and the yoni, the locus of the female principle.
27.11.2012 – 05.01.2013