Guru of abstract

S H Raza is more than the sum of his bindus

Saiyed Haider Raza has lived in Paris for the last five decades but comes back every year on an India visit. Of recent, these visits have been less enjoyable than Raza might hope for, with the media hounding him to ask the only way it seems to understand art now: Sir, what do you think of the rising price of art, and is it sustainable?

The Indian reality is a little removed from Raza who made Paris his domicile, seeking an exclusion from India but not her ideas. This achieved two things: at one level, Raza gained the NRI market of patronage long before his Indian peers, and therefore a market price that has remained bullish for several decades with no slowdown.

At another level, it gained him exposure among art collectors in the West without Raza having to make too much effort, and in so doing, he became one of the early artists to have inspired collectors of contemporary art to look towards India.

Of course, it also achieved that impossible "" it gave Raza exposure to, therefore an adoptive style that was able to translate Indian ideas into the idioms of his hemisphere.

There is an exactness to his art with no play for personal indulgences that characterise many of his peers from India. The disciplined line is most evident in his abstracts with their strong colours.

Yet, Raza is most closely identified with the bindu, or circle (or dot, seed, zero "" call it what you will) that became his oeuvre and with which many lay people connect him unselfconsciously. It returns him to his Indian roots with a geometric correctness, yet is not tantric in origin, as many suspect.

Instead, the bindu is the primordial force that emerges from the priomoridal sound (Om) and is symbolic of energy, or germination, and of the elements of nature.

In his bindus, as in his abstracts, Raza has used a lot of strong colours as well as blacks, something that has been part of his original style when he was a painter in Mumbai. (For a brief while in the 1990s, he toyed with whites.) His early landscapes were abstracted but not strictly abstracts, but collectors over the years have begun to pay increasing heed to his prolific sketches, drawings and paintings, an exhibition of which is running at Delhi's Shridharani art gallery till October 17. Many of them are preliminary sketches meant to form the basis for his canvases.

While his Parisienne influence first veered towards a geometrical perfection in his spaces, they also converted him completely to a structural abstraction that showed up time and again in urban or nature's landscapes.

While his early abstract works are layered with thick oils applied with a palette knife, the bindu series (which has since consumed and subsumed him) deserve merit for their absolute perfection.

"Raza is one person who doesn't play games with his art, and has very relevant ideas," says gallerist Sharan Apparao. "He's one of few people who have translated Indian thought into a more contemporary situation. He defends his work very well and is nicely positioned."

At 83, still agile and painting, there's not much anyone else could ask for.