I have a faint memory of the first time I met Akbar Padamsee, but I vividly remember the first time I saw his Metascape series in the late 90s, a decade and a half after they were conceived and executed... At the time, I didn't know that the controlled colours and formal lines indicated a Parisian influence, or his use of symbols like the sun and moon (as the two controllers of time), portrayed a deep engagement with Sanskrit texts such as Kalidasa's Abhijnanasakuntalam. To the 16-year-old me, they were sci-fi landscapes, of a distant world waiting to become known. They were 'cool'. Even more fascinating were his computer generated images that looked like psychedelic explorations totally out of character of an engaged mind. Akbar's many reputations preceded him, he was as much a philosopher as he was a painter, and a scholar of Sanskritic linguistics. He was known to be the creator of mathematical colour graphs in paintings and an aptly self-defined 'grammarian of art'.

"The subject matter is chosen to allow for the possibility of using colour,'' Padamsee says, "but there must be something uncanny there. Unless it is a disquieting, uncanny landscape I would reject it." This preoccupation with the "disquieting feeling" has been the foundation of Akbar's work. Not a roaring fire, but a slow kindling, rising to a pitch in intensity, ongoing to ensure that a deep inner glow will pass from image to image to counter all that which is stable, complacent and normative. Akbar's work explored the boundaries of the untested and untried more than any of the Progressives or contemporaries of his time, whether it be his exploration of digital media in the early 80s, or his use of paint in the juxtaposition of his abstract and figurative work. Akbar never shied away from unsettling himself, his subject, or his viewers in his search for a formal logic.