Nitin Bhayana: Rediscovering a Parisian palette

BUSINESS CLASS/ It's time to look for new artists and media as art prices soar

This past decade has probably been one of the most exciting ones for contemporary Indian art. The meteoric rise in the awareness has taken us all by surprise.

The gigantic leap in prices has come as a rude shock for collectors who were leisurely building passionate collections. With the auction fever gripping the country and the press hyping art as the new investment option, many serious collectors have, sadly enough, been forced out of the market.

However, I personally don't see this as a threat but as a challenge to exercise even more discretion in a chaotic world and venture into the avant garde, explore exciting new mediums or find other undiscovered, long forgotten heroes.

In a country as vast as India, doing so might be tough but it's certainly not impossible. I found this out earlier this year when I discovered the exceptional work of Paris-based Rajendra Dhawan.

Dhawan moved to Paris 35 years ago after getting a degree from the Delhi College of Art. After two years in Belgrade in the 1960s, he joined the generation of Indian abstract artists like S H Raza and V Viswanadhan who began working in Paris.

Unlike Raza, who had little recognition in France, Dhawan successfully found galleries to show his work and soon developed a dedicated following with collectors in both France and outside.

What sets Dhawan apart from his Indian contemporaries is that his work was less ethnic as he never sought to create an indigenous abstraction even though the subtleties of the "Orient" are very much obvious in his work.

If one looks at abstraction in India, we have V Gaitonde, Ram Kumar, Raza, Viswanadhan, Nasreen Mohammedi and Jeram Patel to name a few. Strangely enough, Dhawan, thus far, seems absent from the list of the important contributors, perhaps because, unlike Raza, he did not feel the need to keep in touch with his homeland, or just that critics and curators found him too distant.

For the most part, Dhawan remains an artists' artist, hugely admired and respected by his contemporaries and the fraternity alike. Dhawan's thinly layered, almost translucent surfaces continue to seduce the knowledgeable.

In the short span that I have been associated with the art world both in India and abroad, I have come to realise one thing "" that one can manipulate in the short run, but over time the work of great artists is almost certainly recognised.

Like Souza, whose expressive figuration was out of context in America at a time when pop was the order of the day, Dhawan's abstraction has been a victim of the heritage of Mark Rothko and Hans Hoffman.

However, this might be just be a unique opportunity for collectors who can still get a senior artist for a bargain. The fact remains that Souza has been rediscovered and, hopefully, Dhawan will too.