It is generally presumed that an artist’s oeuvre is a mark of his temperament and his circumstances. While Raza’s early works draw on landscapes and historic locations he would have visited or painted from photographs, his progressive inclination marks states of enigma, with the canvas demonstrating a transformative exuberance as much as a sombre, even dark state, that recalls the depths of the black paintings of Pierre Soulages. It may be surmised that Raza was entirely interested in using light as a fractal, that could break through the painted surface, and create peaks and troughs to absorb or reject illumination. The process speaks of intuition and a universal approach to the human condition. In his conversation and correspondence with Indian friends and artists, Raza would have been keenly aware of the social turbulence that the nation underwent in the decade of the 1960s, with the Indo-China and Indo-Pakistan Wars, the deaths of successive prime ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri, and a worsening economic situation. It is, perhaps, at this point that his journey diverges quite sharply and becomes more deeply Indian, even as it seeks a more cosmopolitan character. Sunil Khilnani, in his book The Idea of India, has suggested that India as a civilization passed through three phases of change. The first was when the country saw feudal powers give way to a single sovereign state; the second was the implementation of the grand vision of democracy, where the right of the vote brought every Indian onto an equal footing; and the third was the confrontation of an ancient civilization with modernity. It is in keeping with this third phase that Raza seems to have achieved his most distinct success, through the evolution of a highly synthetic, abstract language.

In Raza’s long career, we may trace at least three phases of abstraction, each seeking a different form of expressivity. While he was still in India, he was exposed to European artists like Kokoshka, Otto Dix, Max Beckman and George Grosz, as well as the Vienna School and Freud. Before his departure to Paris, we already see a flattening of perspective and the first burst of abstraction that rips through his impressionistic, peaceable landscapes by the mid-1940s. Paris in the 1950s, with its different currents and styles, the lingering influences of Fauvism and Cubism, presented other aesthetic possibilities. Like other artists of his time, Raza in the 1950s responded with heightened engagement to the current painterly preoccupation with gesture and speed, identified with Lyrical Abstraction.

Raza’s picturesque landscapes open out into non-representational painting as early as the mid-1950s; in a work like “Untitled 1956” from the present collection, the ground seems to appear with great force in the foreground, virtually rising above and submerging the standing houses in the rear. It is as if a massive tremor has set upon the landscape, like a great cataclysm. Through many mediations in colour and form, the ground becomes the artist’s primary subject, assuming a propensity to heave and shift, and rupture and part, to reveal extraordinary depth. By the time we approach “Day Raga” (1966), the mood is vibrant, even ecstatic. Against a deep, sanguine background, the surface seems to break into jagged peaks and troughs against a turbulent sea of red. Clearly, there are periods of experiment along the way, the aqueous drip effect of “Untitled” (1964) recalling, for instance, the large expressionist works of Joan Mitchell, which she painted while living in Giverny around the same time that Raza was working in Paris. Three or four works in the present show speak of a darker phase, in which a luminous depth emerges out of the energies of black paint. Raza was painting these works in the mid-1960s, contemporaneous to Soulage, who spoke of white as a redemptive presence in his “black and night” paintings. Raza has been identified with the colours of Rajasthani paintings, the fiery molten sunsets of the desert, the eclipse-like black sun, and the vibrancy of the Indian landscape. Simultaneously, the influence of European abstract expressionism, Biblical readings of light and darkness, and the symbolic cultural value that is attributed to colour may be read in his works. In “The Invisible Cross” (1970), the ecclesiastical conflict between darkness and light, between good and evil, is signified as the light that redeems and leads away from an uncomprehending darkness. Raza’s own preoccupation with these two elements, of the sun as the illuminating Bhanu Mandala or else as the black orb/star of Islamic belief, introduces a phenomenological strain, even as its presence marks the artist’s movement away from gestural to geometric abstraction.

In what may be seen as the third and conclusive investigation of abstraction, Raza gradually allows the elemental forms of the Bindu and the square (also interpreted as the Vastupurushmandala) to gradually subdue the turbulent, even reckless energies of the expressionistic landscape. Order is imposed through a highly calibrated geometric symbolism, one that seems to draw from the wave of geometric abstraction that swept the West, as much as from the ancient Indian geometric symbolism of the Yantra. This allows us to understand how Raza reinvests the ground with endless possibilities. While his landscapes have been interpreted to represent space as site, Raza himself refutes this association. He wrote: “Some paintings like Satpura, Bhumi and Saurashtra carry very little actual visual elements.” In reworking the ground with a fresh canvas as it were, Raza found enormous potential in the Yantra, which by definition is a “a tool and a form, used to control, curb, bind or influence.” The Sri Yantra, the form haloed by Shankaracharya in his 8th-century text Saundaryalahiri, which celebrates the union of Shiva and Shakti, appears as both the sculptural form of Meru and as a two-dimensional object of veneration. Raza draws generously from its geometric elements, its ascending and descending triangles. However, he also dismantles and reimagines its possibility to reinterpret the ground. He draws on symmetry but reconstitutes the different geometric elements: he adds linear effects that vibrate and pulsate across the surface of the painting, rendering the work rhythmic and aural. The square, that is suggestive of Vastu and holds the Yantra, is deliberately broken in parts to appear like an unfinished painted frame, while the luminous black orb seems to draw all the colours of his paintings into its dark depths.

Dominating each work with its enigmatic presence, the black sun in Raza is a magnetic object of contemplation and lends itself to different readings. Raza’s own explanation was fairly cryptic “…’black suns’ in my paintings were mostly the earth or the sun or the moon. I believe that this subject can be painted for centuries to come. In any case it has been the essential preoccupation of my work—this earth from which we emerge, into which we go back.”

Other readings may place the black sun in the domain of psychic phenomenology. A follower of Tibetan Buddhism, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung had visited Darjeeling to study the religion. He thereafter wrote of the Mandala and its centre, defining it as “a central point to which everything is related, or by a concentric arrangement of the disordered multiplicity and of contradictory and irreconciliable elements. This is evidently man’s self-healing on the part of Nature which does not spring from conscious reflection but by an instinctive impulse.”

The black sun dominating the centre of Raza’s paintings can signify an eclipse and its concomitant belief in a radical change of energies. Equally, it may be Khatim, the black planet which heralds the Prophet in Islam as the last rasool or messenger, a symbol that marks the end of a spiritual quest. In the exhuberance of his later works and his use of colour as life-affirming, the sombre black sun places Raza within the unsettled verities of his time and our own. Distant and enigmatic, it allows for a pause and a return to the primordial state of stillness.