Conceptually, however, Gaitonde never considered himself as an abstract painter and was averse to being called one. For Gaitonde art started in an intensity that moved steadily towards refining itself and every moment for him was philosophically speculative. Hence, exploring inward spaces and fleeting realities came naturally to him. This also explains why the painted surface in his abstract works, characterised by a kind of personalised hieroglyphics and calligraphic inventions, resonate with intuitions that may be related to his discovery of Zen. The artist's explorations on the luminosities and densities of colour can best be explained in terms of the formation of puddles of water on a marble floor, hand in hand with their consequent drying process.
Random shapes emerge only to disappear and re-surface.
These uncertainties are played upon skilfully, and each moment tends to demand stillness. Another high point of his compositions lay in what might be called animation, a kinetic power that imparts movement to the delicately balanced configurations, for Gaitonde governed their formulations with a feeling for the form that was imperative. He devised each construction in colour, such that each had its own internal harmonic life. In a nutshell, then, Gaintonde's paintings refer only to themselves, the process is the result, the non-objective preoccupation is resolute, in art as it was in his life.