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The Bindu has been the leitmotif in S.H. Raza’s work, growing in meaning over many years. To this primordial symbol he was introduced as a boy of eight years, in his native village of Kakaiya in Madhya Pradesh. The intensity of the experience remained, pursuing him as a lodestar, surfacing many years later when he was in France with dynamic force as The Black Sun.
Raza’s concern with nature was to explore the elementary principles of space and time which govern the universe. To express these fundamental concepts which form the basis of Indian thought, he used the principles of pure geometry. His use of the point, line square, circle, and triangle compose part of a universal language—explored equally by the pioneers of abstract art in 20th century Europe and, later, the abstract artists of the New York school as well as traditional shilpins in ancient India.
This book traces the evolution of a vision over fifty years of painting, by an artist who retains his Indian sensibility. His is an impassioned language of colour and form which evokes through the senses, poetry and music in painting. His images are improvisations on an essential theme: the mapping out of a metaphorical space in the mind which is India. The Bindu becomes enshrined as an icon, as sacred geography, restoring us to a sense of wholeness.
Geeti Sen is an art historian and critic, and has authored and edited several major books on Indian art. She was art critic for The Times of India, Mumbai, and India Today, and assistant editor at Marg, Mumbai. Sen was Editor of the IIC Quarterly published from the India International Centre, New Delhi and was Director of the Indian Cultural Centre in Kathmandu, Nepal, from 2009 to 2013.
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