In Crépuscule à Ste-Agnès – French for ‘Twilight in Sainte-Agnès’ – Sayed Haider Raza is re-interpreting dusk in the mountainous village in Southeastern France, near the artist’s home in Gorbio. Delicate wꦬashes of colour envelope areas of thicker impasto to suggest the illumination of the canvas from behind. The interplay of contrasting tones and textures, between the chalky blues and washes of black, deftly convey the liminal feeling of twilight and the passing of time.

Raza’s painting style during this period embodies this sense of transition. He would soon go on to abandoning figuration altogether, and yet the place and time referenced in the painting’s title indicate a tangible, worldly connection. 1962 was the year that Raza temporarily moved from France to the United States. It w💫as here that he cultivated a new and intense interest in Abstract Expressionism. While he had been channeling semi-abstract aesthetics in France for his earlier landscape paintings and urban scenes, the shift towards greater abstraction demonstrates his curiosity in his painting's potential to incite feeling and emotion.

Whether literally or allegorically, there is clearly a blurring effect at play in the current lot - between day and night, feeling and vision, life and expression. As a work that delineates a time of transition in more ways than one, Crépuscule à Ste-Agnès reveals🦋 both a complex and emotional response to the natural world and a fascinating moment in the celebrated career of this Modern master.

'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 there is an irrepr⭕essible rhythm; but it is no longer nature ꦜas "seen" or constructed, but nature as experienced.'

(G. Sen, Bindu Space and Time in Raza's Vision, New Delhi, 1997, p. 79)