Memo Akten’s Simple Harmonic Motion works are part of an ongoing research series investigating complexity through simplicity: to explore the nature...

"The landscape has no boundaries." - AKBAR PADAMSEEIt was in the 1970s that Akbar Padamsee began to paint his Metascape series, coining the term 'metascape' to describe landscapes that had no fixed location in space and no relation to the passage of time. In these uninhabited metascapes, of which the present lot is one, the sun and moon often shine in the same sky, eternally illuminating land and sea. Shadowy mountains in brown and ochre loom over fire-red plains, and deep blue bodies of water reflect the glittering light from the wedges of paint representing celestial bodies. According to the critic Yashodhara Dalmia, Padamsee's metascapes are among his most distinctive artistic contributions and illuminate his precision and control over colour and texture. "These were brilliantly choreographed planes of light and dark made in thick impasto which evoked mountains, fields, sky, water. The controlled cadence of colours breaks into a throbbing intensity as the artist in his most masterly works invokes infinite time and space." (Yashodhara Dalmia, "From Realism to Supra-Realism," Indian Contemporary Art: Post Independence, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1997, p. 17)While the present lot appears to be stark and still at first, a closer look makes the viewer realise an underlying sense of movement that emerges in every meeting of the fields of contrasting colour employed by the artist, and in each textural impression of the palette knife with which he has meticulously applied them. Speaking of the dynamic interaction between the planes of colour in these metascapes, Padamsee explains that "...colours expand and contract, colours travel on the surface of the static painting...colour trajectory is strategy...A colourist needs to master the art of silencing some colours, so as to render others eloquent." (Artist quoted in David Elliot and Ebrahim Alkazi, India, Myth and Reality: Aspects of Modern Indian Art, Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1982, p. 17)Padamsee thus creates, through his favourite juxtapositions of cadmium and orange that are complemented by browns and blues, a landscape that is both real and surreal. His metascapes "...include both a truly detached and analytical approach and a fascination for tautological rules. In the paintings the image prods the exercise, form being distilled to reveal the core. Curiously the endeavour is as old as it is modern: the artistic pursuit of a philosophical intent." (Mala Marwah, Lalit Kala Contemporary 23, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1979, p. 36)The present lot, therefore, is the reimagined landscape that results from Padamsee's liberated formalism. Devoid of figuration and any explicit spatial or temporal location, these grand, almost mythical paintings straddle the frontier between representation and abstraction and are simultaneously archetypal and timeless.

“I like to think of the surface of my paintings as an archaeological site where you can uncover surface after surface.” – AKBAR PADAMSEEIt was in the 1970s that Akbar Padamsee began painting a series of quiet and expansive landscapes that he called ‘metascapes’ – a term that described archetypical environments that had no fixed location in space and no relation to the passage of time. These metascapes emerged from Padamsee’s landscapes and were quiet, yet powerful; restrained, yet evocative. “The lakes, rivers, and mountains in his paintings are actually depictions of Water, Earth, and Air. The Sun and the Moon are the great Fires…Padamsee is a materialist, when you define matter as the few irreducible things our life is made of.” (Gieve Patel, “To Pick Up a Brush,” Contemporary Indian Art from the Chester and Davida Herwitz Family Collection, New York: Grey Art Gallery, 1985, p. 10)Padamsee’s metascapes “include both a truly detached and analytical approach and a fascination for tautological rules. In these paintings the images prod the exercise, form being distilled to reveal the ore. Curiously the endeavour is as old as it is modern: the artistic pursuit of a philosophical intent.” (Mala Marwah, Lalit Kala Contemporary 23, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1979, p. 36)The uninhabited metascape of the present lot depicts an inky blue sky with fiery orange mountains looming over vast swathes of uninhabited plains. Each impasto facet of the rugged expanse of sky and land of the present lot has been painstakingly constructed with a palette knife by Padamsee, adding texture and subtle tonal variations to evoke a sense of movement, as well as one of endlessness. He creates, through his favourite juxtapositions of cadmium and orange, complemented by browns and blues, a mountainous landscape that is at once real and surreal. Devoid of figuration and any explicit spatial or temporal location, these grand, almost mythical paintings straddle the frontier between representation and abstraction, at once archetypal and timeless.In catapulting the viewer into a place where geographies and chronologies fade away, the artist underscores the universality of experience. Constantly experimenting with colour, form and structure, these paintings are imbued with an almost hallucinatory calm. They offer no points for reference, making it deliberately difficult to understand scale or to locate the foreground. It is their luminosity which enables a transcendence of notions of time and space.