Oil on canvas 50 x 60 in. (127 x 152.5 cm.) Inscribed 'OCTAVIO PAZ LOS PRIVILEGIOS DE LA VISTA / MAUN GAMAN / 1969 / SRA. PAULA A. RAMSEYER' on exhibition label on reverse Originally purchased directly from the artist in India by a Swiss diplomat in the 1970s. Los Privilegios de la Vista, curated by Octavio Paz, Centro Cultural Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico, 1969, cat. no. 304. The current work was shown at an exhibition organised by Octavio Paz in Mexico in 1969. The work was then owned by a diplomat friend of Paz’s who lent it to the exhibition. Paz and Swaminathan had a relationship of mutual admiration and respect. Swaminathan wrote ‘Octavio is one of those rare geniuses, (who) have the power of devising the submerged intelligence in you and then listening to him is the experience in self-discovery.' Paz wrote the following poem 'to his friend Swaminathan, the painter.’
The eye explodes Fountain of signs The serpentine undulation moves Wave upon wave of imminent apparitions The canvas a body Dressed in its own naked enigma
Swaminathan and Paz collaborated on various levels over the years. Paz inaugurated the exhibition held by Swaminathan’s Group 1890 in 1963. Group 1890 had been formed the year earlier, with Swaminathan having written the manifesto. Similar to the Progressive’s efforts to create an identity that was independent of the sentimental Bengal School and free of Western influence, Swaminathan and his fellow artists were also keen to create a form of art that was unfettered and free of all conformity and remnants of previous artistic traditions and practices. Experimentation and genuine expression were central to their thought process. Paz and Swaminathan also collaborated on a literary publication called Contra in 1966, which attempted to present new views on art and aesthetics, challenging the existing theories and practices with much enthusiasm.
The title of the current work, Maun Gaman, or The Departure of Silence, indicates that the work is far more conceptual than the simplistic landscape it would appear to be. The artist has used colours and seemingly familiar forms to create a unique, infinite reality. ‘The introduction of representational forms in the context of colour geometry gave birth to psycho-symbolic connotations. Thus a mountain, a tree, a flower, a bird, a stone were not just objects or part of a landscape but were manifestations of the universal.’ (J. Swaminathan, ‘Modern Indian Art: The Visible and the Possible’, Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi, March 1995, p. 49)
Owing to the way Swaminathan used colour on the flat surface of the canvas, content and form become one. ‘The mountain is defined by its magnitude – a feeling of largeness which seems incommensurable to the dimension of an easel painting. The order of largeness which seems incommensurable to the dimension of an easel painting. The order of largeness, is however, made commensurable with the dimension of a bird that is, in any way, at much higher elevation. The bird, metaphorically speaking, transcends the largeness of the mountain it appears absolutely large. Thus the content – the idea of mass and quantity – is presented not in terms of Albertian quantities of vision but as a noumenal agency of intuition.’ (K.B. Goel, ‘The Other’, ibid., p. 81)