SYED HAIDER RAZA (B. 1922)

With no recognizable feature in this painting, the only clue Syed Haider Raza provides the viewer is with a title Ardèche. Raza captures the valley of Ardèche in south-central France with its limestone cliffs shimmering in flaming red colors like fireworks bursting across the canvas -- a spectacle of color. It is Raza's insistence and fascination with the need to understand and capture the infinite shapes and moods of nature in the most intimate and poetic order of imagination that is reflected beautifully in this painting.
"What is created in Raza's fragmentation of forms are analogies - not the outward manifestation of reality as in his earliest works, or the imaginary landscapes in his early gouaches - but the "real thing," through the substantial realm of colour. There is vigour here, and an irrepressible rhythm; but it is no longer nature as "seen" or as "constructed", but nature as experienced." (G. Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza's Vision, New Delhi, 1997, p. 79)