Unknown Artist
79 x 56 cm; 31 x 22 in
(Accompanied by certificate of authenticity from Professor Ratan Parimoo, former Dean, Faculty of Fine Arts, M S University, Baroda) Modern & contemporary indian art Zen master Gaitonde is the most vital artist of the foundation of modern abstraction in India. The Zen master Gaitonde had retrieved into his shell a few years before his death in 2001. It seemed as if Gaitonde had retired inwards into his shell away from anyone and everyone, so much like Mark Rothko. In this work there is a reflection of an inner silence,one that stands out like a milestone in the abacus of creativity, it forms the crucible of connectivity to the brilliance of his abstraction to the truth that he was an artist who was indeed ahead of time. For him the landscape swung open into the abyss of the void that would formulate the dichotomies of the mood of silent symbolism. The work looks like a landscape with the dawn/dusk somewhere in the twilight zone of the seen and the unseen, it seems as if the landscape exemplifies the essence between being and nothingness. The work personifies at its best an ephemeral sense of awakening just a feathery touch of whispery whimsy which stays back for that fragment of time wherein it becomes a timeless entity. For friends who knew him, Gaitonde was evidently in his orbit as it were, to friends in conversations with him, he said: ?I was different to it?. He was talking about life,abstraction nad other things in the landscape. Indifferent, as he was never with the collective, but an individual, this being the central characteristic of his artistic personality. His non-conformist nature was accompanied by a firm belief in his identity as a painter, and because of his firmness, Gaitonde isolated himself very early in his career from everything in his environment which he considered irrelevant to his identity as a painter, his growth over the years is marked by an increasing inwardness and a meticulous and watchful consolidation of this identity. Uma Nair, Bodhi Buzz, March 2006 (Accompanied by certificate of authenticity from Professor Ratan Parimoo, former Dean, Faculty of Fine Arts, M S University, Baroda