A deeply poetic and cerebral work, Los Grajos IV is an enchanting work by the Spanish-Filipino artist Fernando Zobel, who is celebrated for bringing abstraction to the forefront of modern Southeast Asian Art. Executed in the 1964 at the height of the artist’s practice, the present lot is a rare specimen of the artist’s mastery of gesture and his fascination with flight. A driving force behind the Cuenca School of artists in Spain, Zobel’s oeuvre is a constant.mes diation between light, colour and essence: an attempt at revealing truth through reduction to an abstract essence in lyrical abstraction. In his own words, he wished “to remember in pictorial terms” using “impacts of light, brightness and colour relationships.”

As an artist whose interest in abstraction was inspired largely by the rhythms and landscapes of nature, Zobel distilled movement in nature beautifully. Los Grajos IV as this piece is titled, takes its name from black feathered rook birds that tend to gather in treetops. A harmonious orchestration of line, shade and colour, the work expresses with lucid claritys the birds’ dynamic flight. Los Grajos IV captures the essence of motion, as the artist himself wrote, “Movement [as] observed and felt, never imitated, yet…clearly expressed.’

The painting is dominated by a backdrop of deep blues and greys, tempered by hints of warm earthy browns. These gradations of shade across the painting recreate the subtleties of light and shadow casting upon the scene, giving it the illusion of depth. What is especially distinct about the current painting is the row of red dots, that teeter discreetly across the top part of the work – offering a curious interlude within the dramatic composition. Painted as tiny red squares, they form a tidy line in staccato like spacings, akin to notes on a music score.

The centre of the work is occupied by expressive black streaks, birds in flight stripped down to their fundamental forms. The texture of Zobel’s brushstrokes carries a sense of fluidity and motion, sweeping over each other and tapering out into the background, as agile as the birds they represent. All this is evocative of calligraphy, with its bolder down strokes and blended lines – Zobel’s fascination with Chinese and Japanese calligraphic traditions led him to take up classes in Manila, the aesthetics of which bled through into the very substance of his work. Even in such a restrained, almost overcast atmosphere, the birds appear transcendent and suspended in space, illuminated by rays of light at the top of the work – heightening the sense of drama and buoyancy the work carries.

Rather than being cold, Fernando Zobel’s minimalism bore the imprint of the human hand, while even the most spontaneous brushstrokes in this work are made with a fully controlled, inevitable effect. In the end, Los Grajos IV is a harmonious orchestration of line and shade, an abstract depiction of movement that is fully grounded in nature and reality.