Osian's Auction Catalogue Indian Modern Fine Arts | June 2017

“The (1962) painting [Painting No.4] was done on wet white with [a] roller and painting knife… The study of ‘Zen’ has helped me to understand nature, and my paintings are nothing else but the reflection of nature. I want to say things in few words. I aim at directness and simplicity.” V.S. Gaitonde as written in his MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York) Artist Questionnaire, reprinted in Sandhini Poddar. V.S. Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life. New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in association with DelMonico Books & Prestel 2015- 16. They are sensuous. Each is unified by a single colour. The colour glows; it becomes transparent; it clots. It is this play of pigment, as it is absorbed physically into the canvas, that directs the eye. Texture is structure. How he achieves this texture is the secret of the Gaitonde style. The rest is simple. The paintings do not gain from being shown consecutively; one does not lead into the next. It is more as if they were parallel essays under a single directive. All his paintings share an uncompromisingly vertical format. They cannot be seen from any other angle. In the application of the colour itself there is no order. This is hieratic, but implicit. It is never insistent. The colour settles and congeals into a series of approximate horizontals throwing the compositional weight somewhat lower than center and balancing the left and right of the canvas like the arms of a scale. This order is almost deliberately obscured by the distribution of near-random forms across the surface. These topographical or hieroglyphic forms themselves are made to dissolve into the field like enamel in an encaustic. Pria Karunakar rpt. In Lalit Kala Contemporary 19 &20, April- September 1975; p.15. He has been successively influenced by painters like Paul Klee and by the philosophy of Zen. But he has absorbed their influences in an unself-conscious manner and long ago evolved a style of his own. Colour, texture and design play on them in a spontaneous, poetic, manner… the western critic will spot a lack of indigenousness in the total format of Gaitonde’s paintings. Such a view exposes the westerner’s prejudices about ‘Indian’ painting rather than it does any lack of integrity on Gaitonde’s part. It is quite some time since art acquired a universal language, and Gaitonde uses that language as if it was the natural thing he could do. Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni rpt. in Indian Drawing Today 1987 JAG; p.104. detail