'No compromises in art'

Ambadas has spent five decades railing against the claustrophic hold of figurative artists on Indian collectors.

At 85, age may have tempered his vitriol, but Oslo-based Ambadas is a mass of flying hands, jabbing fingers, gesticulating wildly, getting teary-eyed in despair, now ruminative, now excited or, as curator Roobina Karode surmises, "exhilarated, disoriented, flowing...". It is quite a performance and it all comes from his heart.

"Husain," his hands stretch out in a horror he cannot imagine, "Souza," he adds for good measure, "they set the style for Indian art and," he hisses angrily, "I am sorry about that." Not because the two were not great artists but because, in fact, "they were good painters". As a consequence, he is now observational, "younger painters have not had the courage to change, to do anything different".

"Careful," cautions his wife of 35 years, Hege Backe, cognizant of the dangers of speaking so candidly to a journalist. But Ambadas is not to be contained, a dammed stream pouring out his pain at the continuing popularity of figurative art. "They want popularity, they want to sell," he says sadly of emerging Indian artists.

Ambadas, a founder member of 1890, a Delhi-based movement against the "vulgarity" of Western and Ravi Varma realism, along with J Swaminathan, Jeram Patel, Himmat Shah, Jyoti Bhatt and G M Sheikh, has remained true "" and perhaps too close "" to their manifest.

"He has been uncompromising, he has not changed in five decades of painting abstracts," says Hege Backe, an interior designer and amateur photographer herself and, as she smiles, "his sotto voce".

On Monday, a four-decade retrospective of his work, Sublime Encounters, will go up at Delhi Art Gallery, curated by Karode where, interestingly, the only articulate changes may be his choice of colours "" "they have become lighter and lighter since he moved to Norway," says Backe, "there's much more blue, which could be a result of his living in Norway, or because of the stage of his life".

Ambadas does not enjoy his life in Oslo, or its people. "I love everything about India," his eyes mist up. Then the quiet mood is gone again, and he is once again a blur of hands and hollow laughter. "I refuse to think when I paint," he says startlingly.

"All thinking is a reflection of what you are living with, and I don't wish to paint that." Instead, his oils, watercolours and, more recently, drawings, embrace a formless, abstract reality, a sense of light and darkness creating forms and, for want of another expression, unforms. They have, according to Karode, "a raw, explosive energy". There is, she adds, "profound thinking and great depth in both his life and art".

He is, she iterates, "very distinct even in his non-representational work which, unlike others, is shorn of iconic, meditative symbolism "" instead, there's constant movement, a restlessness, strokes chasing strokes..."

"Our philosophy" "" Ambadas refers to Brahma, for instance "" "is totally abstract, our thinkers were abstract, but later thinkers, like our artists, have become smug". And just as he broke the contours of form, he insists, "you have to break through in search of new awareness", scathing about "blind devotion to the old, to experience..."

Is that the reason for Ambadas's slow recognition in India? "I think," says Backe spiritedly, "he has been respected all along, but if recognition depends on sales, on how many lakhs a painting is worth, then yes, it has been slow in coming." To which Ambadas might well add, "No problem."