It has been 34 years since Dhawan moved to Paris after an art degree from the Delhi College of Art (1953-58) and a two-year stint in Belgrade in the early ’60s. Dhawan, like S H Raza and V Viswanadhan, belongs to a generation of Indian abstract artists who have spent the better part of their creative life working in Paris. What sets him apart is the fact that he has never sought to create an indegenised abstraction unlike the other two.

 If one corner of Dhawan’s painting resembles a mystic landscape, the other is a colour field where thinly applied translucent and opaque colours merge with and react to one another. It is this constant oscillation that makes the 68-year-old artist’s works so enamouring. At times the paintings hinge on the periphery of recognition, and sometimes they transform into self-reflexive spaces that ponder over the essential nature of painting itself.

As critics have noted: “Dhawan does not represent, he shows the act of painting.”

The expert modulation of colours, the tight compositions of the paintings so cleverly camouflaged, the tonal variation within the seemingly solid colour areas, the quality of ‘edging’ when two different colours meet all combine to give the canvases a misty, shimmering surface. Most importantly it is his ability to combine stillness with the feeling of constant movement in the work. Dhawan’s works are pure painterly experiences that are a sublimation of the self and the act of painting itself.  

Dhawan lives and works in Paris.