Osian's Auction Catalogue Indian Modern Contemporary Fine Arts | October 2018

‘His structures were elemental, uniquely his own. He conjugated them to create undreamt of images. Hills, birds, insects, plants, water, air, unbuildable buildings but no human beings. Their relatIonship on the canvas had nothing to do with the laws of this physical world. The area of painting was its own unique universe in which the impossible is credible. A rock suspended in mid air with a sleek bird atop of it, a mountain reflected in a lake which leaves you guessing as to which is which, and steps on a monument leading nowhere. The entire drama enacted in the richest and most unusual colours.’ Krishen Khanna rpt. in ‘J. Swaminathan’ , LKA 1995 “Swaminathan’s colour geometry of mountains has a peculiar pictorial grammar. In them, the content becomes form. The mountain is defined by its magnitude - a feeling of largeness which seems incommensurable to the dimensions of an easel painting. The order of largeness is, however, made commensurable with the dimension of a bird that is, anyway, at much higher elevation. The bird, metaphorically speaking, transcends the largeness of the mountain, it appears absolutely large. Thus the content - the idea of mass and quantity - is presented not in terms of Albertian quantities of vision but as a noumenal agency of intuition. The truth, in the colour-geometric configurations of incomparable magnitudes, is simple to grasp. The sublime, in comparison with which all rest appears small, proceeds intuitively and aesthetically through the imagination of the eye alone. Or, as Kant might put it: the evaluation of size is subjective because the measure is the human body.” Goel, KB , The Painter in His Labyrinth rpt. in Art & Ideas, Nos. 27-28, March 1995 ‘He expresses a spiritual sentiment about the unrealised universe, but through the mediating mirror of nature. These are in a sense landscape pictures. There are zigzag mountains, delicate, transparent and lofty; symbols of ascent and of eternity. There is usually a piece of the mountains, a free-floating rock, hung against the sky, and with its perfect poise, defying the gravity of the earth. Sometimes this aerial rock is the perch of a bird or its floating vehicle. There is always an exquisite bird, or pairs and sets of birds: swallows, cuckoos, parrots, koels and peacocks. There is usually a tree or a flowering bush at the foot of the mountain or the crest of a hill: a virginal plant in the first flush of spring; a fragile tulsi, a cherry blossom or a gulmohar. A tree sprung from the air, as it were, all fragrance and colour, its roots barely anchored to the soil its branches filigreed against the sky. The space (akasa) of the picture radiates light.’ Geeta Kapur rpt. In Contemporary Indian Artists. Vikas Publishing House 1978; p201.