Beyond The Black Sun : Sayed Haider Raza

Uma Nair

‘Aarambh’-Sayed Haider Raza’s adagio to his birthday at 93 plays out like a morning ‘raaga’-its nuances and notes finding harmonies within the realms of colours and tonalities and flowing between moody crags and crevices-the sharps and trebles seen in the strokes of spring summer and autumnal instincts in his own abstract realms.

“We talk everyday about painting and he likes to dwell on related dialogues in reflection within conversations,” says curator and critic Ashok Vajpayee who is the authority on Raza. The show is an ode to his birthday which is a celebration of his own arduous hours of labour at his home in Safdarjung Enclave in Delhi. Nature, for this artist, is something eternally alive. It is embedded in the cosmos as a whole and actually does not refer to the world we live in today, but is open to evolutionary questions such as the ‘where from’ and ‘where to’. What we see reminds us of many regions and worlds, which exist in the mind and imagination as well as in reality, and, therefore must be recognised. Sayed Haider Raza believes that nature moves itself rather than being moved by the beholder.