Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
The work of Antonio Puri accounts for his migrant status. Born in Chandigarh (North of India), raised at the foot of the Himalayas, formed in the United States, and finally settled in Bogotá, the artist refuses to be identified with any specific context or geography to claim an existence detached from the impositions of an identity.
This condition is reflected in essentially hybrid works, in which different materials and cultural references merge, dialogue, interact or stress. Each piece is a meeting place for all these elements that have the subjectivity of the artists as unique point of confluence. That’s why Puri ensures that his work is rather narcissistic, and that it is only explained in relation to his own life and experience. "Everything I do has to do with me - he says - not with people, places or things".
This radical singularity unfolds in personal connections that link historical data, daily events, the idiosyncrasies of the places in which he has lived, cultural legacies and even his own body. The images, the formal configurations, the techniques, the materials and the textures of his works acquire their meaning when they are associated with him. Art and life are intercepted here not in the exaltation of the public sphere - as happened in the 1960s - but in the rediscovery of the intimate and its expressive possibilities.
In recent years, Puri has been revisiting the work of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, author of the urban design of his hometown. In fact, Chandigarh is the only community in the world that concreted the ideas of the renowned architect, who projected the organizations of numerous cities on the planet - including Bogotá - without being able to carry them out. In his humanist conception, Le Corbusier proposes the construction of spaces and buildings with a human scale, in contact with the cosmos and with nature, that enhance life in common. But for this to happen, he considers it necessary to purge individual desires. This is stated in the mandate that bequeathed the inhabitants of the Indian city: "The objective of this edict is to enlighten the present and future citizens of Chandigarh about the basic concepts of planning of the city so that they become its guardians and save it from whims of individuals."
The Lecorbusian architecture uses concrete as a fundamental building material. Because of this, Chandigarh is a city made up of gray tones, which contrast with the colors of nature and people. In 2016, Antonio Puri held an exhibition there titled I Love the Beauty of Gray, in which, in addition to paying homage to his place of origin, he incorporated gray as the predominant color, endowing it with personal and metaphorical qualities.
For his first solo exhibition in Colombia, Puri decides to adopt Le Corbusier as a symbolic bridge. Considering that the design of Chandigarh is immediately subsequent that of Bogotá, he imagines the Swiss architect projecting many of his ideas and utopias for this city in its Asian counterpart. A monumental work made especially for this exhibition integrates both designs, establishing an unusual connection between two sites that have very little in common, except for vital, creative and imaginary links, driven by an architect in the last century and by an artist of ours.
One of the characteristics of Antonio Puri's work is its composition in superimposed layers, which are at the same time material, cultural and symbolic. His canvases and papers have a thickness that invites a reading in depth. By means of a special technique, the traces, the layers of paint, the textures, the transparencies, build a complex surface that enables two kinds of approaches: a distant one, which in general is presented as a more or less liberated abstraction, and another one, that reveals an infinity of subtleties and details. To all this, some significant elements are added, such as the craftsmanship of the papers, the mandalas, the architectural plans, sometimes a few words. In the series Homeless, this word summarizes ideas about displacements, the diaspora, the impossible identity; in its realization, the artist uses a gold coating that refers, at the same time, to the obsession with this mineral characteristic of Indian culture and the legendary lost city of El Dorado.
One of the signs that appears with insistence is a rope or its spectral trace, which alludes, according to the artist, to the numerous ties that constitute us as human and social beings (from the umbilical cord to family ties, religious rituals, sexual games, certain aesthetic practices, etc.). Puri questions these attachments, prefers to ignore all kinds of ties, but at the same time recognizes their social place. Hence his adoption of the dialectical approach - attachment / detachment - when reflecting on some issues that involve them, and especially, on identity.
The majority of Puri's works are organized in dynamic series, which respond to contingent reasons rather than to a formal logic. My Soul Has Many Shadows, for example, is composed of 44 pieces, a number that corresponds to the years of life that the artist had when producing it. The50series emerged six years later, when he reached that age. Today he is carrying out a new set of works that is titled 100 lives, and that continues in process. This somewhat arbitrary perspective in the configuration of the series, separates it from the modernist practice that saw in serial work a way to purge all traces of individualism. Puri, on the other hand, establishes vital connections with his works, which do not hide a certain irreverent, capricious or ludic side.
The artist also vindicates the vitality of painting despite the announcements about its death; however, it also experiments with its limits. In a group of constructions realized with united frames, it transmutes the bidimensionality of the pictorial space into structures destined to the three-dimensional world. In these pieces, canvases become true "supports". The surfaces reserved for visual representation are obstructed and the interest moves towards the sculptural volume. Satirically, both Black Tongueand Double Black Tongueare paintings that erect their own wall, which makes them autonomous. Their visual configuration is an enigma; only the traces impregnated on the edges of the frames are visible. Their use as constructive modules draw attention to their concrete materiality. Columns and walls also refer to the architectural language, in a new reference reminiscent of Le Corbusier's work.
Ordered Transcendence
Throughout the centuries, belying millennia of creative endeavour, the query of the nature of art, its sources and inspirations, the rapport between the creator and the created has never ceased to defy reductive reasoning. To redress the manner of process, more significantly the identity of a work of art beyond medium, scale, subject, and artist, delves into more obscure discourse. Antonio Puri, drawing inspiration and metaphors from diverse geographies and idioms of his life, renders this congruity a most poetic and personal lexicon.
This project heralds the confluence of the artist’s half-century birthday, and in honour of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris ( Le Corbusier, 1887-1963) and the long-awaited conferral of UNESCO World Heritage status on the city of Chandigarh, the city of Puri’s birth.
Permeating Puri's work, there reign echoes of harmonies, invoking a timeless connection between man and nature, between the senses. In this era of rapidly wrought imagery, this artist insists that One must look deeply, not casually, permitting the myriad reflections of means, matter, form and energy to unfold and commingle.
In the words of Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976), the renowned German philosopher, in particular of hermeneutics:
The artist is the origin of the work.
The work is the origin of the artist.
Neither is without the other.”
“Where and how does art occur?”
(Poetry, Language, Thought, The Origin of the Work of Art. Translated by Albert Hofstader. Harper & Row, 1971)
By this dialectic, the dynamic of the process and quest come into being… Thus, the questions arise:
Are these maps
Are these corporal maps
Are these veins, capillaries, arteries
Are these ancient traditional treatises
Are these a forging of a personal, albeit recapitulated lexicon
Puri’s modem on how to travel to a parallel universe, seems to reflect its connection between the minute and the infinite, of the possible 11 dimensions. These works reveal a surreal aesthetic, perhaps a more contemporary melding of material and imagery, bearing traces both concrete and conjectural.
One addresses the artist’s mediums of expression, involved through such a Renaissance- like labour intensive process. Layers of gesso, introducing and then removing elements, only to leave shadows of their existence. Betwixt image and abstraction, despite his material allusions of cartography and perception, such calligraphic delineations decry as point-like particles defined as strings.
In the thirteenth-century poem titled Sir Orfeo, the Greek myth of Orpheus and the Underworld is recounted per Celtic verse in diverse dimensions, just aside the human world. It upholds that things can live simultaneously in both realms (Anonymous poem Sir Orfeo is preserved in three manuscripts: the oldest, Advocates 19.2). Perhaps such worlds where Puri recounts his imagery as he embodies his journeys betwixt the East and the West, rendering them closer as metaphors and allusions.
Beyond string theory, the construct melded with the metaphysical, weaves personal memories and journeys with historical and architectonic entities. Anon, Puri states that his body equals his work. Hypnotic tapestries belie a questioning of the identity of creativity, of the source of manifestation. By forging his layers with deft and subtle processes, the abstract and figural meet, merge and transmogrify.
In the Dharma Revisited series, the metaphoric circular grid speaks of the artist's 'self'. Timelessness is positioned as if a head, whither to connect with other elements. At this juncture, he utilised coffee grains and tea in lieu of the sumi-e and walnut ink of his earlier elements, then similarly sealed with a medium. Ever reconsidering, reconfiguring, with regard to the 2002/2003 series entitled Dharma, he has now added the intermittent mendhi, on burlap or hemp.
In Puri’s words, "Anything that I do is about me...not about people, places or things.
Every place I document ...all relate to what and how I experience it.”
And so the seeming DNA illusions, of multicellular organisms, amoeba-like forms, recast his sagas within architectonic spaces and organic loci.
Weight of my Soul, a work of 75 panels, reflects and ponders, the anchor point for the Chandigarh Museum exhibition, about which the other pieces engage and exist. He states that it almost turns into wallpaper, a tribute to the highly focused and fluid aesthetic. This, he considers to provoke a challenge to critics who have proclaimed the demise of painting. This body of work is quite transforming, firstly of the space in which it shall be installed, and secondly for the Viewer (s).
Similarly in his columned pieces and another which protrudes from the wall, these layered canvases insist that paintings do not need a so-named face per se. The muscle, or core of his work, at the edges reinforces the overflow of mediums and interconnection from one entity to another. Layering of canvases describe a more anonymous version of this vision
There is a spirit of craftsmanship and composition in his paintings and constructed works, echoing the vision of Le Corbusier to design and realize buildings, interiors and artworks to functionally and aesthetically exist within their geophysical environs. Born in Chandigarh, he has imbued these influences of concrete modernism (concrete, modalities of linear organic tones, structured and fluid mobility) throughout his sojourns across the globe with a blend of lexicons and materials. And so, his mode of expression tends to a metaphysical realm, despite his lengthy, creative process, which does conjure forth comparisons of erecting edifices, planning cities, and the like.
For the mastery of materials barely defines the means, thus the quest to attain, a magical blend of mind, body and spirit constitutes the essence of concern and artistry. His voice is poetic, with strains of music, with reflections on embodied landscapes and man-made forms.
CONCRETE + STRUCTURE + MULTIPLE
"Know thyself"Socrates
Antonio Puri’s works reflect on their own nature, breaking their primary two-dimensional state and deconstructing, transforming predeterminations and labels. His creation is honest, since it allows one to see its material condition: the reverse, the stretcher bars in which it is held, the joints, the screws, and finally, the transformation into large three-dimensional structures that challenge the idea of paintings that hang on a wall.
The work Lengua Negra Doble (Double Black Tongue) part of the series of three works called Lengua Negra, is a set of 148 stretcher bars wrapped with organic jute from India and then he applied acrylic paint, to create a monumental unit. Canvases assembled one above the other, with marks on both their front and back, present a three-dimensional object that requires a large space to be appreciated from all sides. As a self-reference, the name of this series originates from how the artist was superstitiously named in his childhood: in the Hindi language, it is called Kali zabanor black tongue, one who has the ability to say things which come true.
Born in the city of Chandigarh (India), with an education in arts from the San Francisco Academy of Art and Coe College in Iowa (United States), along with a law degree from the University of Iowa, Antonio Puri reflects upon his life experiences in both the East and the West. This is evident in the complexity of personal symbols and metaphors presented in his works. As he himself admits, the works he does are "always about his own life".
One of the central pieces in this show, titled C. Diff, composed of 150 paintings on handmade cotton paper mounted on wood, denotes his cultural hybridity and existential self-reflection. In this work, Puri transforms a cartography sketch designed by the architect and urban planner Le Corbusier between 1947 and 1951, as part of the Pilot Plan for the city of Bogotá. The modern urban model of Le Corbusier could not be carried out due to lack of response from the authorities of this Latin American city, but fortunately, the master architect was able to realize it, adapting it to a new context in the city of Chandigarh. It is here that we find coincidences that enhance the works of Puri, born in this city: the artist creates a maquette of a wall from the Government Museum and Art Gallery of Chandigarh, each panel representing one of the 150 blocks of concrete in a similar dimension. This visionary project of Le Corbusier that was born in Bogota but became concrete in India, is again transferred by Puri to its original city of creation. The transformation that occurs by the displacement, the adaptation that this entails and the new appearing structure, transmits the complexities that Puri wants to make evident in each series. This work shows different layers of meaning: various grays of concrete, symbols representing the bacteriaClostridium difficile, contracted by the artist while eating street food in New Delhi, the holes in the concrete from the wooden mold that created them, represented by grey circles with resin, the 22 karat gold from India and El Dorado, the maps and texts from different addresses that marked his life, are all combined in this immense composition that forces the observer to stop and discover new horizons of meaning.
This diversity of symbols and materials he uses are combined with a complex minimalism, as presented in this exhibition. Homelessis a series of 162 individual pieces on handmade cotton paper, through which the artist reflects on the concept of home. Puri says: "a home is not a house"; he considers that inner identity lies in not having a defined home. Fiftyis a series of 50 compositions in inks and mixed media over handmade paper, created as a celebration of his 50 years on earth. These paintings represent his visual memories commemorating vital experiences, turning them into space-time representations of each of the years lived. My soul has many shadows, a series of 18 drawings in small format, gives an account of the weight in the artist’s soul, which gets lighter as he spends his allocated time here. Finally, the painting House No 24is a metaphorical grid of the birthplace of Puri, and relates to the sectors designed by Le Corbusier for the city of Chandigarh.
The works of Antonio Puri force us to appreciate, subtly, three polyvalent concepts that appear almost obsessively in his work: the concrete, the structure and the multiple. The layers of experience from the journey of Puri’s own existence, converted into veilings of monochromatic paintings, demand careful observation in order to discover that beneath tranquility lies the deepest and most intricate.
I love the beauty of grey
It is not really long back that an Artist-Architect, Le Corbusier, etched his innermost feelings in actual time and space by designing the city of Chandigarh. Interestingly, it is once again that one comes across another artist, Antonio Puri, etching his intimate thoughts in actual time and space. A common thread between the two is that of creating their visions in concrete. The difference being that the former created walls and ceilings and the latter, painted canvases. To the world, their works appear to be creative edifices but scratched deeper, they seem to be hiding innumerable personal life experiences and journeys, some joyful and some poignant.
Antonio Puri’s Hindu-Christian name releases him from the confines of religion and geographical constrictions, imparting universality to his identity and his work. However, despite his having ventured away to the Western world, his soul is firmly grounded in the soil of modern city of Chandigarh, his birthplace. It is this bond that reflects impressions from Chandigarh in his works that are essentially in the form of Abstraction.
Just like the iconic and imposing Capitol Complex of Chandigarh that recently received World Heritage status from UNESCO, Antonio’s work titled, “Chandigarh”, Mixed media on canvas, 96” x 144”, 2014, builds together a number of small canvases, to create a large composition imparting the impression of a wall that could be part of any of the impressive buildings designed by Le Corbusier. Interestingly the composition has deliberate spray of red and white, in no specific order, giving the impression of serenity observed in the Japanese paintings.
Almost as a response to his work ‘Chandigarh’ and an ode to his own existence, Antonio’s work titled, “Birthplace”, Mixed media on canvas, 144” x 288”, 2012-2014, seems to reverberate with personal life experiences that are associated with the city of Chandigarh. The composition seems to be emerging into a random pattern based on a grid that is the basis of the organized architecture of the city. At a personal level, this could be the various complex situations experienced in a city that is organized.
It is fascinating to understand the technique employed by Antonio. His canvas originally begins with a riot of colours that gets treated under layers of monochromatic colour palette in grey, giving the impression of concrete that ,literally, sets the composition in concrete. The layers are not a mere artistic exercise but are representing layers of Antonio’s personal life journey. A journey that took him away from the place of his birth to far off lands, with life experiences that have left a deep and permanent imprints on his life, just like the concrete of his canvas.
“Assembly Hall”, Mixed media on canvas, 71” x 68”, 2014, gives the impression of architectural line drawing with an aerial view of the building. The strong black lines interspersed with dotted patterns are the representation of the Assembly hall. Antonio’s large assembled works, when displayed, span the architectural space, making an impact that impels its viewer to take its notice. In contrast, his work, “Antaskaran”, Mixed media on Canvas, 12” x 60”, 2018, a smaller composition which is a corner-piece, seems to be gently embracing the architectural space from both sides at right angles, appearing to be encompassing the essence of space, matter and existence. There is a philosophical appeal to the composition.
His works are an amalgamation of geographical spaces that span continents yet there is a reflection of tenacious relationship that connects with human emotions. The compositions appear like a Google map encompassing various mountains, valleys, plains, water bodies and cities, with all of them having a physical entity that is wrapped together in abstraction. The vast expanse of his canvases is subtly interspersed with elements like the moon, spray of flowers and motifs. His canvases don’t seem to be having a beginning or an end, inviting its viewer to interact with his creation from any point that pleases the viewer, for his compositions are not mere abstractions but carry hidden symbols of life’s journey. There is an independent story and a vision that builds up in every part of the composition.
The multilayered textures of his works create a drama that does not need the refuge of colours but are more perceptible in a palette that is monochromatic. The loops of thread might give the impression of movement but they are essentially a metaphorical depiction of the complexities of life. Antonio takes dots and motifs from the decorative tradition of Henna and Rangoli that are integral part of Indian culture. It is his strong connection with his birthplace that might seem, physically, far away in the Western World that Antonio has settled in.
Antonio experiments, artistically, with the urban planning of modern architecture of Chandigarh. While he creates the impression of Architectonic structures through his canvases, he also experiments with dimensionality by creating block structures. His work titled, “Cornerpiece”, Mixed media on Canvas, 14” x 12” x 60”, 2014, is a 3-dimension composition. The grainy layers of colour trickling down the front panel gives the feeling of flowering vines that gives an impression of veiling heaven under their cascading grove. Despite the monochromatic colour palette, there is a comforting feel of the floral spray.
Playing yet again, with the monumentality of the architecture of Chandigarh, Antonio creates a linear composition titled, “Stack”, Mixed media on canvas, 16” x 20” x 70”, 2012. Literally, a stack of a number of canvases, the work is a reminder of the early days of construction in Chandigarh that every citizen who had settled in the city at that time, relates with. Unlike his grey palette, this composition is in the gentle tones of pale white with an occasional spray of Rose pink .There is a sense of celebration of creativity , perhaps of life, and hope for the future.
Interestingly, Antonio relates the 50 years of his own life with the 50 years since the passing away of the architect, Le Corbusier, whose Chandigarh opus has been more of a muse than an inspiration to Antonio. His work, “Cincuenta”, acrylic on hand made khadi paper, 22” x 30”, 2016, is like a joint tribute both to the Architect and to himself. The term Cincuenta meaning 50 in Spanish , shows an amalgamation of the personal and artistic journey of Antonio. The colour grey has attained a gentler tonal effect and the Indian traditional motifs in white create a sense of spirituality that perhaps is the path that might be leading Antonio to a new direction. Perhaps this work might be heralding a new trajectory of his personal and artistic journey.
Having received Art degrees from Academy of Art University of San Francisco and University of Iowa, Antonio has exhibited his works in many countries and various museums. Who knows, his exhibition at the Government Museum, Chandigarh, could either be the catharsis, or a kind of home coming - connecting his past to his present.
Taking artistic liberty with the concept of reinforced concrete, using its grey palette, playing with the textures, Antonio reveals his personal life experiences on his canvases. The embedded motifs are like those memories that have become an integral part of his own entity. He creates a microcosm within the expanse of the Universe, interpreting the stories that are his own but are open to anyone who has the desire to read and interpret them.
One is reminded of Kahlil Gibran’s lines –
And if it is for your comfort to pour your darkness into space,
It is also for your delight to pour forth the dawning of your heart.
Contrast
Antonio Puri creates paintings in series, examining both personal subjects and broad philosophical issues. Puri has an inquisitive mind, one that is seemingly a cross between alchemist and philosopher. In his paintings, he is as apt to explore far-reaching social or spiritual issues as personal biography. Yet, viewers need not know his intensions, which are often indicated by concise titles, in order to appreciate his work. He produces paintings in various scales utilizing a wide range of media, from acrylic paints and resins to collage with paper and other materials. While all of his images are abstractly conceived, some are completely non-objective. Others include obscured representations. Moreover, he composes with both geometric and biomorphic forms. The complexity and diversity of Puri’s output represents the expansive approach of the twenty-first century artist.
This particular exhibition includes work from a number of different series, an especially insightful installation as it hints at Puri’s extensive production. What also becomes clear when examining these paintings is not only his work ethic, but also the wide range of his interests and the depth of his intellect. Puri is an artist philosopher—an explorer of big universal themes like birth and death, the role of the artist in modern society, and the positions that we hold as children and parents. Indeed, he is himself a child of the world, an internationally shaped individual whose education and artistic ideas are the products of east and west.
For instance, in his series of small paintings entitled Bardo, Puri produced twelve works on the theme of the afterlife. The term “bardo” is Tibetan for what is described as an in-between state connecting life and death. It comes from the Bardo Thodal, the Tibetan funerary text known in the west as The Book of the Dead; its purpose is to serve as a guide through the interval between death and subsequent rebirth. The paintings, created in acrylic with thick resin surfaces, suggest a kind of dream place as described through biomorphic grey, black, and white cloudlike forms. They are stunningly beautiful abstractions that operate both as individual works and as a united series. Their limited palette contrasts with a Baroque depth of space. Indeed, the contrasts between life and death, black and white, soft and hard, and near and far all connect directly with the overarching theme of the exhibition.
Other paintings in the exhibition come from various series, including one entitled Dharma, a Sanskrit term that refers to the ideas of duty and law as they pertain to the constructs of society and religion. These works demonstrate a more architectonic structure and display a very different surface and application of paint, one that incorporates automatic drawing. Emanating out of a European Surrealist tradition, this technique provides a way of working that includes chance elements. The overarching architectonic structure of the work contrasts with the organic automatism to produce a work that is both elegant and complex. Another group of small paintings, entitled Drishti, also incorporates automatic drawing, now with an intense red color. Drishti is Sanskrit for vision or insight. In these small forceful works, Puri brings together east and west, resulting in images that both explore and contrast form and content through an abstract style.
The Abstract and the Personal:
A Contextual reading of Antonio Puri’s series, “I AM”
Antonio Puri is an artist who uses multiple perspectives in his engaging and thought provoking abstract compositions. In his 72” x 72” paintings which match his height and arm span like Leonardo’s vitruvian Man, he reveals the influence of many philosophical world views. His ever evolving visual aesthetic discourse in his current series of fourteen paintings I AM is a journey where viewers can contemplate canvases that convey his interpretation of labels. Puri deconstructs these labels to make a point about the value or damaging quality of labeling in contemporary society. Friends and acquaintances were asked to describe him using only one word. responses ranged from obsessive, lawyer, father, narcissist, patient, dreamer, enigmatic, cornerstone, soul mate, orphan, Himalayan, healing, destined, to one of us. Is a single word or phrase adequate in the description of the artist who embodies all these identities and more? Do labels differ from east to west where one philosophy is more communal and the other highly individualized?
Puri, a Punjabi indian who was born in the foothills of the great Himalayas, is very much a child of the eastern hemisphere. His early childhood was characterized by conversations with buddhist monks who would bring him to their small huts outside the village. His elementary and secondary education took place in Catholic boarding schools in India which introduced him to western perspectives. Puri developed further westernization in the united states as an art student. He subsequently pursued a law degree and studied international law in europe. He later abandoned the practice of law to become a full time artist. Puri is the manifestation of a fluid bridge between both sides of an east-west dichotomy. He is moreover, unique in his blended multiculturalism and aesthetics. His hybridism is subtle to all but his most intimate friends and associates. In much the same way, his paintings appear, at first glance, to be simplistic abstract reflections of art and life that simultaneously accept the perspective of the viewer. Puri’s appeal is that he cannot be neatly categorized by a single label or even multiple labels. In this exhibition, he artistically constructs and then deconstructs labels in his enigmatic fashion in a subtly confrontational dialogue.
As an art historian, I am intrigued by the inclusion of the contextual as well as the conceptual in deciphering works of art. For me, art does not simply exist for “art’s sake” – the artist’s intent is paramount. on the one hand, a viewer can simply enjoy one of Puri’s paintings as an abstract expression, a meditation, or a simple feast for the eyes. I feel strongly however, that a viewer or critic must also know the objective of the artist to truly enjoy and understand his art on a deeper level. I have had the privilege of knowing Antonio Puri as an artist for six years. He has exhibited at the McKinney Gallery at West Chester university as well as other venues and engaged modern art students with his art demos and dialogues. Over the years, students have favorably responded with essays regarding the work seen in his solo and group exhibitions and art demonstrations. A more complete understanding evolves when students and visitors are introduced to his philosophy and the underlying purpose of his complex compositions.
The canvases of Antonio Puri remind me of italian renaissance paintings that have multiple iconographic meanings ranging from commonly understood motifs to the very complex philosophies of the humanist literati of the time. Puri’s art is rife with symbolism where each mark, word, and image is highly meaningful. His work can also be read as performance art in the manner of buddhist or navajo indian sand paintings that encrypt mysticism within the colored sand patterns. Puri circles around his canvases for hours placing thumbprints impregnated with paint or plaster over multiple layers of inks and paints, images, and words. Unlike a buddhist mandala or native American painting that is meant to disappear through brushstrokes or strong gusts of wind, his art is a more permanent expression of performance art. Antonio Puri is a philosopher and an artist. He speaks eloquently on many topics with a passion that inspires and challenges his audience. My need to know why the artist chose specific motifs, words, colors, materials, and techniques led me to a rare five hour interview of the artist at his studio in the richmond section of Philadelphia while colleague and photographer, nancy rumfield documented each canvas.
The series took Puri two years to complete during a very productive period in his life that was also characterized by physical and emotional pain, healing and transformation. The opportunity to speak with Puri allowed me to transcend the ordinary spectrum of interpretation while at the same time confronting the flotsam and jetsam of his everyday life. In I AM, he methodically and one might say, obsessively, incorporates thumbprints, broken glass, string and the painted paths created by string, glass beads, crushed rock, clay, and photocopies of medical documents, MRIs and x ray film within layers using wax, matte medium, plaster of Paris and varnish to bind them to the canvas. For a casual observer as well as the more sophisticated viewer, these are extraordinary paintings.
One is invited to look closely upon the surface for clues into the descriptive words he chose from dozens of other labels to illustrate with an obsessive process that defines each composition. His paintings are extremely personal; some are painted as celebratory works for his son Alexander and as such, are not for sale. The inspiration for others comes from joyful or painful experiences and positive or negative personality traits such as the canvas entitled narcissist. During this interview, I was once again convinced of Puri’s charm and audacity. At the same time, I was also struck by his humility, intelligence, and willingness to bare his soul. He invites each viewer to consider their own mortality and personality quirks as they gaze upon and contemplate his abstract compositions. The series is a point of departure for other work that challenges conventional thought about the subliminal and deliberate nature of singular labels upon the psyche.
I AM consists of conceptual self-portraits where each word, thumbprint, piece of string, image or newspaper clipping are deliberately placed. These are not random markings but the outcome of a thoughtful process. The series itself is non-objective, yet the title and materials used are crucial signifiers of personality within the compositions. Puri’s intention and procedure are meditative progressions where he and his viewers lose focus on the painting itself and achieve a state of stillness and self discovery. The medium is similar for all the compositions; each caption is a synopsis of the meaning given by the artist for the paintings. Puri’s deconstruction through layering, negative space, color and texture allows for a universal reading that transcends the purely personal view of the artist. Positive, neutral and negative terms are transformed into astonishing displays of art that acknowledge the futility and the utility of labels in contemporary society.
Dr. Virginia M. da Costa is an associate professor of Art History in the department of art at West Chesteruniversity, West Chester, PA.
The local requires new meaning in a global world. In the end art becomes a local idea. Hans Belting
Can a grid of squares and a set of circles embody emotions, experiences and states of mind? Are they stripped of cultural references and speak a universal language of contemporary experience? At the heart of recent works by Antonio Puri lies this central paradox- the geometry of human emotions!
While in western aesthetics, objectivity of emotions has been highly contested since the Enlightenment when the term aesthetics in its modern usage was coined. From Kant to Bullough, debates have been raging in the west about the subjectivity and the objectivity of emotions until modernists developed their own take on representation of mental states. The very rise of abstraction was hailed by early modernists like Clive Bell and Roger Fry as a new aesthetic democracy when the basic formal components like line, shape and color were believed to constitute human experience, accessible to all. No special cultural learning but a pair of eyes was all that the spectator needed to enter into this modern aesthetic experience. Today, after the cultural studies turn into social sciences, the plurality of cultures and their differences have been valorized and celebrated for over a decade. Now with the rise of neuro-aesthetics and interculturalism in the study of art theory, the pendulum appears to be swinging towards a new universalism that seeks commonalities across cultural differences.
Puri’s abstractions can be located within the emergence of this resurgence of universal globally. They hardly fall within the strict purview of modernist abstraction. His style, in a sense, telescopes a wide range of legacy from classical abstractionists, the gestural of the abstract expressionists and contemporary neo-abstractionist. It has none of the pristine placement of forms in a neat grid or the anarchic brushstrokes of the tachists but the rectangles and squares float in this interstitial space between lucidity and chaos.
It was in idyllic island of Mauritius that I met Puri at an international workshop of Indian diaspora artists a few years ago. As a resident critic from India, I was struck by the vital energy that his style of working exuded and his intense absorption of this new, exotic locale. As if every branch of the new flora and the rocks in the campus could be charged with new semantics and brought within the arena of his canvas -literally and metaphorically. Of all the other participating artists from Guyana, Sri Lanka and South Africa, Puri’s canvases posed a problem in classification. No visible sign of the common symptom of diaspora nostalgia that compelled most artists of Indian origin to fixate their attention on Indian rites and rituals, mythology through which they explored their roots. Puri’s canvases apparently distanced themselves from revealing such obvious marks of his Indian identity. Far from a denial of his roots, it is the apprehension of being put in a slot that lies behind the caution. After all, identity is not something to be staged via a predictable symbols and iconography recognizable as ‘Indian’ but impels imagination at a deeper level.
Perhaps the Indian imaginary lurks where you least expect it- not just in the evocative titles like Himalayaor Healingthrough familiar geography or the long civilizational history of esoteric mysticism that India is globally known for, nor in the Tantric geometry of circular mandalas-the traditional psychic diagrams used as aid in meditation. It is present as an epiphany in the linguistic register- in the way the commonplace vocabulary of squares and circles are troped and shifted off centre to arrive at a hidden asymmetry- what one of the renowned linguist-philosopher of 10thcentury, Kuntaka, termed as vakrokti- the art of troping that creates the poetic meaning.
Despite proliferation of geometric shapes on Puri’s canvases, they pulsate with energy that lies beneath, and again and again, pick up seemingly random lines, squiggles or even graffiti like marks that lie strewn around. Moments of chance encounter with intentional planning and meticulous orchestration of pictorial effects.
If grid was the defining structure of early 20thcentury modernism in the west that blocked any easy entry of the narrative, in Puri’s hands, it loosens and develops cracks that reveal the organic - even readable elements and textures from the real world, just as colours from one square ‘leak’ or ‘drip’ into the other. Just as the painted hands in Destinedstart with fingers poised in abhaya mudraor the gesture of benevolence (which almost parallels the gesture of benediction in Byzantine iconography) and then slowly the fingers splay to fan out in all directions breaking out into a wild dance! Hence this grid is not about containment but excess!
So the story does not unfold laterally as in a classic story telling mode but vertically layer by layer where the concentric circle suck your attention into its depth as if induced by heavy slumber. The squares float across the thick medium of paint brushing across bits of the real- strings, x-ray images, and tangible shadows. In this slow process of dissolution, the forms fold in upon themselves in Orphan and leave behind the chromatic world. In this alternation between the monochromatic and the colorful, unfolds an abstraction of expressionism- an abstraction that invokes the visceral world of wounds, pain, and the feeble pangs of rationality. If we return to the emotive aesthetics of the rasatheory, the pain represented belongs not to a specific individual but a generalized state experienced by humanity at large. If emotions can be re-imagined as ‘ownerless’ and dissociated from ego, Puri captures it via the universal language of line, shape, color and forms in our “post-ethnic world”.
References:
Arindam Chakrabarti, Ownerless Emotions in Rasa Aesthetics in Asian Aesthetics, ed. Ken-ichi-Sasaki, (Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2010) pp. 197-209.
Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg(Eds.) Global Art World, Audiences, Markets, Museums.(Berlin:Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2009).
V K Chari, Sanskrit Criticism(New Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass 1993).
Parul Dave Mukherji teaches in the department of Visual Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.
Is there still life in abstract painting, and if so what kind and quality of life? These are the questions that are raised by Antonio Puri¹s abstract paintings. They¹re inevitable after a century of abstraction--a century since Kandinsky¹s gestural abstraction and Malevich¹s geometrical abstraction emerged. In 1935 Alfred Barr declared them the be-all and end-all of avant-garde creativity. But a lot has happened since then, especially the academicization and conventionalization of avant-garde art, and with that of high abstraction, whatever its expressive form.
So the question is to what use Puri puts gestural abstraction. Does he breathe fresh life into it--fresh spiritual life, to recall Kandinsky¹s view, stated in 1912, that abstract art alone keeps spiritual consciousness alive in materialistic modern times, and Motherwell¹s assertion, in 1951, that ³abstract art is a form of mysticism?² Is this still the case at the end of the 20th century? Can gestural painting still have spiritual import? Puri¹s New Millennium paintings suggest that it can. But with an important difference: Puri¹s abstractions are rooted in Buddhist rather than Christian spirituality, as Kandinsky¹s and Motherwell¹s were, however different their forms. Kandinsky is explicit about his Christian sources, Motherwell less so, although his Spanish Elegies have been understood to be crucifixions in all but name. Malevich¹s Suprematist paintings have been said to be Russian Orthodox icons in abstract disguise, or rather to have made their innate abstractness explicit.
In other words, Christianity no longer seems to be the spiritual point, at least for Western artists. No doubt this has something to do with the convergence of East and West through globalization, and with that the attempt to reconcile their spiritual differences. These are not merely exotic differences: spiritual otherness is an obstacle to practical harmony. But the decreasing importance of Christian spirituality to abstract artists also has to do with the fact that the Buddhist attitude of compassionate detachment seems a better way of surviving emotionally in the modern secular world than the Christian emphasis on salvation through suffering. Newman¹s Stations of the Cross are perhaps the climactic expression of Christian spirituality in abstract art, and with that the theory that suffering is the exclusive way to otherworldly transcendence. For the Buddhist, spiritual transcendence is a practical this worldly matter, not a privilege of ritualistic suffering unto deliberate death.
It must be emphasized that it makes no sense to privilege Eurocentric Christianity as a superior embodiment of spiritual consciousness in an increasingly global and specifically Asia-oriented society. Eurocentric Christianity is thus no longer the necessary basis for a genuine spiritual abstraction. In a sense, Buddhism is more realistically spiritual than Christianity, for it aims at enlightenment rather than resurrection. Transcendence involves achieving universal consciousness rather than personal salvation. Buddhist universal consciousness accords well with abstract art¹s ambition to communicate universally (transculturally) through its dialectical use of the contradictory universal languages of geometry and gesture--to communicate and symbolize fundamental truths through the dialectic of fundamental forms.
Puri is well-positioned to take the Buddhist path--the most important revolution in attitude and concept that abstract painting has had since its implicitly Christian beginnings. As A. M. Weaver writes, Puri, a native of India, ³embraced Buddhist concepts,² which for him meant ³adopting a practice of conscious existence and awareness of the completeness and interrelatedness of every aspect of life.² The recurrent circle in Puri¹s work conveys this completeness and interrelatedness, even as it suggests the self-containment that results from constant consciousness of them. ³Puri¹s circles are mandalas awash with color, drips and undulating splashes of paint.²
Mandalas abound, but good paintings--aesthetically convincing paintings--are rare. The painterly character of Puri¹s paintings is what makes them good, not their Buddhist import. The artistic issue is how Puri spiritualizes his paint--how he makes the mundane material of paint ³vibrate² spiritually, that is, convey the cosmic consciousness he associates with Buddhism. It can only be achieved by detachment from desire. The paradox of Puri¹s paintings is that they resonate with desire and passion, conveyed through their painterliness, even as their circles—a geometrical form that symbolizes eternity and integrity in many cultures--convey the cosmic consciousness that transcends desire. It is this paradoxical synthesis of sensuality and spirituality—passionate attachment to sense experience and dispassionate detachment from the lifeworld with no loss of concern for it--that gives Puri¹s paintings their aesthetic resonance and expressive complexity.
He is clearly an abstract expressionist, as his brilliant polyptych Conversation with Pollock, 2003--he¹s ingeniously fragmented the Pollock all-over mural painting, serializing it into the discreet easel paintings in which it originated--makes clear. Kali¹s Demise, 2006 is another abstract expressionist tour de force, whatever its spiritual aspect. Kali is the Hindu goddess of destruction. And the Essence Series, 2005, with their squares--another geometrical symbol of cosmic wholeness and the ³supreme² modernist icon, as Malevich emphasized--are elegant distillations of gesture and surface. Puri is clearly exploring every aspect of abstract surface, from the gesturally extravagant to the meticulously refined. He tends to work in series, reaffirming the modernist idea that the creative process--virtually every work is a process painting--matters more than the particular aesthetic product that results from it, however much that product must stand on its own aesthetic merits. As Weaver writes, Puri¹s paintings ³attempt to place traditional Asian spiritual concepts within the context of modernist and postmodernist practice.² But my point is that their edifying spiritual effect depends on the edifying aesthetic effect he achieves through such practice.
But the real secret of Puri¹s aesthetic success--the spiritual beauty and expressive richness of his paintings--involves what he calls his ³modified Batik technique.² It involves, as he writes, ³using wax as a resist,² which allows him ³to reveal several layers of paint, which would ordinarily get covered up.² ³After the wax has been applied the fabric is dipped into a dye....Thin lines appear where the pigment is able to penetrate the crackled wax surface. This process can be done any number of times, depending on how many colors are going to be on the fabric.² In other words, it is not simply the layering that matters, but the transparency of the layers by reason of the wax on which they are painted. The expressionistic sedimentation of paint is a familiar way of creating tangible texture, but the transparency afforded by the wax creates an effect of translucent depth--of the inner luminosity and unwavering interiority associated with spirituality in all cultures.
Puri¹s modified Batik technique may be Asian in origin--²batik is an ancient technique used in Tibet, Nepal, and India,² and ³it has traditionally been used on fabrics such as cotton or silk²--but it could just as well be avant-garde: it satisfies the requirements of modernist painting, that is, painting which emphasizes the medium at the expense of whatever image may emerge from its handling. Even the ancient Asian Mandala has its equivalent in modern Western geometrical abstraction, suggesting the
universality of the spiritual aspirations and contemplative function innate to both. It is ultimately the universal modernist dimension of Puri¹s paintings that makes them aesthetically convincing and authentically spiritual.
Essay by Miriam Seidel
Growing up in wide open spaces may be a good way for an abstract painter to begin. Jackson Pollock grew up in Wyoming, Mark Rothko spent his youth in Oregon, Agnes Martin grew up in Western Canada, Washington State and Oregon. Antonio Puri lived for many years of his childhood at the base of the Himalayas, and the imprint of the immensity of the landscape there can surely be felt in his work. That vast mountain range may not be explicit in his paintings, but the overarching circles that anchor his compositions have a similar hugeness of scale and inescapable presence.
Gazing up at mountains, and the mystery of their transformation under different atmospheric conditions, may also encourage an appreciation of ambiguity. The interplay of layers in Puri’s paintings seems to reflect such a heightened awareness. In one recent series, it’s hard to predict which element will be primary: the underlying circular form, or the veil of dripped lines that cover it. In works like Before 4 and Before 5 (both 2002), the crisp circumference of the white circle snaps into awareness first, looking behind black and whte drips like a huge moon seen behind branches and clouds. In another work from this series, Before 2 (2002), the wash of drips takes over like a waterfall, obscuring whatever form lies underneath. Puri’s many layers of drips and washes are held in a subtle, dynamic balance, and endless play of hiding and revealing, that pulls the viewer in for further contemplation.
Puri seems to have reversed the usual associations of the iconographic elements in his paintings; instead of soft curves and hard lines, he defines his circular forms with sharply delineated curves, and his loosely unpredictable lines drip over the under layers with a soft chaotic complexity. Contrasting associations begin to interweave in the same way his disparate layers seem to move in and out among each other.
There is a sense of monumentality in Puri’s work that may also owe something to his early experience. The square, four-by-four foot size of his Before painting, and even the slightly larger series After, is not overwhelmingly large, but these works achieve a spacious feeling that suggests a greater size. Yet Puri does allow himself to work much larger at times, notably in the series of unstretched canvases he has made every year to commemorate his son’s birthday. In some of these paintings - one of the largest so far, “5” (2003), is twelve by ten feet - he also employs wax, to create further surface elaborations. The molten wax is dripped on in gestural curves -not the stately washes and drips of his final layers, but in the more frenetic, Pollock like loops with which he often starts his work. (Although that initial layer is usually completely covered, it often imparts a ghostly textural layer below the visible surface activity.) After painting other layers over them, he then irons all of the wax off, using his own modified batik technique. The resulting, frangemented and interweaving play of negative and positive elements imparts a charged energy to these surfaces. The jittery, white lost-wax markings on the blue double circles of the The One I Missee (2001), for example, give off the air of an electrical storm.
At this greater scale, the circles also multiply and interact. In Stretched Too Far (2003), the two mottled hemispheres of a circle pull apart in a kind of cell division, trailing a webwork of drips between them. In another recent painting, Mitosis of the Soul (2003), two separate circles readiatie energetic filaments of wiped-down paint, like thicker versions of the trace-marks of wax.
Even while suggesting readings as forms of microscopic life, these works retain their monumentality. In fact, the massiveness of the forms, and the corresponding delicacy of textural and linear detail that covers them, makes the association with planetary bodies hard to resist, although Puri does not avow any intention toward that reading. Once seen and felt, monns, earths and other planets seem to be everywhere.
Among his smaller works, there are paintings that project an altar-like-calm, particularly ones such as Mini Dharma 1 (2003) that hang in a thin vertical format, like a Japanese hanging scroll painting. On the other hand a painting like Kilimanjaro (2003), with its earth tones and raw forms, seems about to burst its edges with raw vitality.
Puri’s symmetrical formats also call to mind the mandala that is a part of the traditional religious art of India and Tibet. In works such as blue-hued Before 9 (2002), and Yellow and Green (both 2003), the reduction to a single color serves as a further unifier, beyond the mandala-like circular composition and symmetrical format. The lacy, fractal detail of Puri’s drips can be seen as activating the surface in the same way the demons and Bodhisattvas compel the eye and mind in a Tibetan thangka. In fact, the elaboration of his different layers, each with its own demands, and the multiplying interactions of the layers as they build up, can be taken as a kind of contemplative practice. It may be that this is the source of the compelling effect of standing before one of the paintings: sometimes serene, sometimes intense, they always envelop the viewer, offering entry into a particularly focused experience. As Puri seems to turn more openly to his artistic sources in his most recent works, as is suggested in titles like Summit, Jaipur and Mini Dharma (all 2003), this effect can only grow stronger.
Miriam Seidel is a corresponding editor for Art in America.
For artists in the twenty-first century the art market is a driving force. Yet, many artists are opting to place spirituality, rather than commerce, at the center of their art making process and produce works that reflect a spiritual quest.
Puri was raised among a sect of monks residing along the Nepal Indian border. From an early age, their monastic practices made a strong impression on him. As part of his formal training, he was sent to Catholic school. However, he embraced Buddhist concepts and ultimately structured a personal practice similar to that of the hero of Herman Hesse’s classic novel Siddhartha. Like Siddhartha, Puri eschews following the teachings of any particular school of thought, instead adopting a practice of conscious existence and awareness of the completeness and interrelatedness of every aspect of life. Thus, the circle appears repeatedly in his work, symbolizing a portal to timelessness. Puri’s circles are mandalas awash with color, drips and undulating splashes of paint. They are meditative devices rendered in geometric form that serve as aids to contemplation and concentration. The circle represents transcendence from the empirical to the spiritual. Puri calls the essence of his spiritual ideology “nondual duality”, which can be translated as the unity of the temporal and the eternal.
Puri uses the process of batik, a wax resist method of working on fabric, to make many of his paintings. In Path of Technology and Cosmology, Puri’s series Essence is monochromatic. After several years of experimentation with kaleidoscopic and muted colors, he approaches these works with a simplicity that is just one aspect of his oeuvre. The mark, or gesture, is paramount in importance. Influenced by the Abstract Expressionists, Puri takes lessons learned from modernism and gives them a particular twist that for him embodies meditative connotations.
In the work of Antonio Puri the concern is not for the human relationship to a deity, but to the whole of a cosmic reality. What is important are the relationships that connect all things to each other, animate and inanimate. Puri is inspired by a world purview that has its origins in the East, yet his work is deeply ensconced in Western notions of contemporary art. The result is an art form for the twenty-first century that embraces both the East and West in a globalized art arena, while still giving credence to the significance of the spiritual journey in the life of the artist.
Puri grew up in the foothills of the Himalayas, in India, and moved to the United States in the early 80’s. His schooling and travels have taken him to Spain, Africa and other parts of the world as well. This amazing influence of cultural fusion has created a unique path of expression. It is no wonder that he is comfortable with creating a global aesthetic that transcends culture and ethnicity.
For his part, Puri believes in the potential and authority of abstraction. Like Abstract Expressionism, Puri’s work is marked by bold gestures, at least it seems so. But, unlike his predecessors, he isn’t painting just his immediate emotions. Rather he strategically plots a painting with a wide array of tools and methods. Process itself is part of his subject matter.
A major process is the “resist” technique used from ancient times by people in Tibet and India, called batik. It involves applying melted wax to areas of a fabric to prevent pigment from penetrating and coloring those areas. The effect is essentially that of an absence or a negative, but in Puri’s hands a resisted shape can look like an expressively painted brushstroke. Besides subterfuge like this, he welcomes accidents. Puri also uses string as a resist in his stretched canvases.
Each sector of one of Puri’s paintings has its own dense history, its own surface interest that can act independently of the composition as a whole. But the paintings have a remarkable unity. Puri’s work bridges the gap between the Eastern technique of batik and abstract expressionism, geometric with organic, flat with textured, and time with the timeless.
In a series entitled “Essence”, Puri has captured the core of his unique style by giving the viewer an X-Ray vision into his painting process. The paintings are subtle yet powerful, microscopic and macrocosmic, smooth and textured, accidental and controlled, all of which reflect the simultaneous birth and dissolution of the universe, leaving the viewer with a sense of oneness.
Excerpt from her essay from the catalog Layering Constructions at the Delaware Art Museum, 2016 -
Chandigarh has served as inspiration for Puri’s work. In the artist’s recent series of stacked paintings, Puri simultaneously constructs and disassembles the notion of painting. The layered forms are placeholders for an imagined form that extends past its current configuration into three-dimensional space, becoming the architectural building blocks of entire cities. In this way, the artist’s monumental intention is testing the boundaries of structure and the conceptions of media specificity. Puri similarly employs the materials associated with painting to undertake a personal journey. The beads, drips, threads, and marginalia that layer the surfaces of the multiple panels in the Chandigarh series signify the fragility of memory, the infinite network of the human race, and the tenuous links that connect us.
Hofmann explains that the relationship between form, color, and texture “is the external expression of an orderly internal process of development.” The physical and conceptual layering that is integral to the practice of Antonio Puri indicates an understanding of the formal limitations inherent in creating an illusion of endless space and the insistence to push those boundaries to their extreme.
The Tenth Door Paintings
What is abstraction? To a naïve person, a mandala may appear to be an intriguing centered geometric design, yet it encodes a sophisticated philosophical system. It is a tool shaped for a particular activity (meditation). An electrocardiogram also might appear to be merely an interestingly varied rhythmic linear pattern, but the activity of the heart is there recorded to be deciphered by those who can interpret its meanings. It too is a tool. The polarities of meaning in these examples contrast pleasing or engaging visual arrangements with specific functional signs. But neither alternative cancels the other out.
Abstraction in painting and sculpture, it seems to me, is potentially something that encompasses polarities and transcends them. It can point to a cosmology or personal history or have a special meaning for someone, but most ambitiously it can hold the potential meanings of sign and design in tension, vibrating between possibilities to suggest a third overarching possibility, what Antonio Puri has described as a “non-dual duality or something without opposites in a work with opposites.”
Just like a mandala or an electrocardiogram, Puri’s paintings engage the basic issues of life and death and function within more than one narrow understanding. The ambitious scale and expansive physical gestures in much of Puri’s work facilitate the sense of an expanded enhanced vision: perhaps microscopic, perhaps cosmic. In some ways, large paintings are especially intimate because they create human experiential contexts. Puri’s paintings record the physicality of their making; they are in a sense partners in a dance.
Pouring and mingling paints, inks, and powders of varying viscosities and textures, Puri builds work that is intentionally simple and grounded in decipherable human activity. Often he incorporates novel materials. These are not random choices selected from what is at hand; these elements have been chosen for a reason. The current body of work, “The Tenth Door,” series is distinguished by applied sheets of newspaper. The haptic surface buckled and rippled when it absorbed successive fluid layers and has set into ruched strips. Glossy or matte, the now mostly obscured paper might be blistering paint or agitated water or eroded lines of carved text. The humble newsprint is permeated with paint, as if with light. It might be a veil between one state of being and another: sometimes seemingly solid and at other times, easily penetrated — even by a breeze. Most especially, the fragile lengths of material suggest a fine thin fabric, a shroud, perhaps a winding sheet or mummy wrappings, all metaphors consistent with the idea of the Tenth Door. This is the door to the highest perception, the door to infinity, and, most important, release from the cycle of reincarnate life. However one interprets this multilayered symbol, Tenth Door is always the last door.
The oblique evocations of death, reincarnation, and enlightenment that might be felt with regard to Puri’s use of newspaper, are reinforced by another perspective on the very same material. The newspaper tells of temporal events, transitory events. It is a common metaphor for all that is “yesterday’s news,” disposable or recyclable. The newspaper is a form of communication. Puri, however, chooses to obliterate, or overwrite its ephemeral messages, replacing them with a larger vision. Only occasional palimpsest fragments survive the massive pours, drips, cascades, rivulets and imprints of paint to remind us that passing moments are meaningful in their time.
Another unique and solemn material that appears in a few of these paintings is a small quantity of ash and bone from human cremation. Its presence is symbolic rather than aesthetic, as the quantity is so small as to be virtually invisible, impalpable.
Why is it here? Puri decided on this course after a great deal of thought. Now the essence and evanescence and rebirth of human life are literally one with the paintings. Puri enacted in material form the evolution of the spirit after death. Physical transformation and rebirth into another form occurs naturally when a body is returned to the earth through burial or cremation; but we don’t always consider that there is a comparable spiritual transformation. Puri firmly believes in reincarnation. He says, “‘Death,’ in quotation marks, is a misconception. The real death is our state of ignorance. I want to create an afterlife for those ashes to parallel the afterlife that we all experience.”
A striving for perfect attunement to the present characterizes the work of twentieth century Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock or his contemporary Helen Frankenthaler. Not surprisingly, these artists are associated with Zen Buddhism, a philosophy that advocates immersion in the present moment as a door to ultimate understanding. Frankenthaler (usually described as a post-painterly abstractionist) once told critic Barbara Rose that the kind of painting she wanted to make, “looks as if it were born in a minute.” Like Puri she is best known for poured, minimally manipulated paint.
Puri, who is himself a Buddhist, does not object to being linked to earlier abstractionists, but I suspect he sees such categories as red herrings. He shares Frankenthaler’s belief that, “Artists get into a state of working where there isn’t a lot of conscious mental control.”
For Puri, each series of paintings and each work within it grows from a specific broad metonymic category with a context of meaning. The series title, “The Tenth Door,” names the highest of the yogic chakras (usually described as nodes of spiritual power located in the human body). Each chakra can be envisioned as a spinning wheel linked to a color and a sound. Each has a purpose and is necessary to mental and physical health, but the chakras are also hierarchical.
Most mystical spiritual traditions share a similar vision. Life energy or prana (Sanskrit) or qi (Chinese) or ashe (Yoruban) or ruah (Hebrew) flows along the chakras. The purpose of meditation is to raise energy from the lower levels, which are more concerned with the physical body to the highest one, the Tenth Door, which is purely spiritual. In Puri’s paintings, flowing color and repeated circular forms, both layered and opening, might be interpreted as energy rising through the chakras toward the Tenth Door.
In a slightly different context, The Tenth Door is also described as a complement to the nine bodily orifices. They are physical and visible; the Tenth Door is hidden, non-material and most fully accessible through discipline and meditation. This portal opens to a state of enlightenment and bliss, infinite and eternal.
This particular series was born when Puri addressed the topic of birth, the creation of organic life. In a group of paintings related to the idea of ontogenesis, certain formal characteristics began to emerge as a response to his query: “How can I make a geometric form which is also organic?” He explains, “There was a separation in earlier paintings between organic shapes and geometric circles. It worked beautifully, but there wasn’t a true fusion. In art we may separate organic from geometric, but in life when we enlarge microscopic forms, we see the union of organic and geometric — also in nebulas and supernovas. The explosions create this beautiful organic material that totally dissolves into geometric form. It was compelling.
“Finally, I began thinking about the idea that when a cell divides, a spherical geometrical form splits and you have this enormous energy. It’s almost like a supernova. And for a moment the geometric and organic are joined. It was my Eureka! moment. I thought, ‘I’ve got to break the sphere but break it organically.’”
But the Eureka! insight did not immediately translate into paintings. Usually, Puri finds that obsession facilitates his work, but this time, he says, “something disturbed me. It seemed like I’d started the sentence but I didn’t know how to complete it.” He put the idea on the back burner and worked on other things.
Four years later he realized that his earlier thinking has been overly literal: “What was disturbing me was that I was [thinking] on a very physical level. I wasn’t allowing it to become ethereal.” He then understood that the idea of death as the end point of the initiation of life had disturbed him. He detoured from his initial insight about the dividing cell, to do a series of works directly addressing death. When his first attempt to “kill the canvas and create a new life” was completed, he set it aside to focus on relatively monochromatic work relating entirely to creation and rebirth. “To me the [earlier death-related] art was successful because when there’s life, there’s also death. It was a personal journey.” But, ultimately, the death paintings were not the answer Puri sought.
With the “Tenth Door” series, he re-engages the topic of material existence and physical death, approaching it from a spiritual point of view. These paintings are dominated by colors that tend toward rust (generally warm) and patina (generally cool), colors associated with the transformation of one material into another. Both rust and patination are forms of decay and of oxidation, which can be described as a very slow form of combustion. Thus, the colors most evident in this series may obliquely be related to cremation. They could metaphorically evoke the material rebirth of the physical body.
Puri’s interest in birth and death brings to mind the words of another contemporary abstractionist who is known for pouring and flinging arcs of paint. Pat Steir has considered the life/death conundrum for most of her career. She told Doris von Drat hen, “You only know that you are alive if you know that a life ends…. The fact of death defines life.” Puri has similarly observed, “When you look at a forest burning down, you see that new growth from the ashes can give rise to a whole new crop: samsara (the cycle of death and rebirth). Every forest has the same cycle.” He adds, “I find open-ended things more interesting.”
The twentieth century abstract painter and teacher Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) coined the term ”push/pull” to describe shifting spatial perceptions resulting from color and qualities of pigment. “It’s not the form that dictates the color, but the color that brings out the form,” Hofmann believed. Interestingly, his most admired series of paintings is somewhat related to Puri’s present series in its attempt to resolve geometric forms (rectangles and squares in Hoffmann’s case) with organic abstraction. Hoffman’s solution appears to simultaneously immerse and float flat painted rectilinear geometries within a sea of vigorous brush strokes. The bright solid colors open like windows and yet are always recognized by the viewer as simple areas of paint.
It’s often thoughtlessly said that Hofmann invented a technical phenomenon in painting (push/pull), but in truth he simply described it rather memorably. For hundreds of years painters have known that darker and cooler colors recede while lighter and warmer colors advance. In the Baroque period artists’ bold virtuoso manipulations of color and value enacted the drama of religious ecstasy or political power. Baroque artists loved to paint dramatic, burgeoning clouds and to exaggerate exuberant, billowing folds of drapery. They also deftly merged solid form with pools of shadow or splashes of light and contrasted large shapes with subtle details. This lively visual experience convinces the viewer as efficiently and predictably when nothing is represented. As Pat Steir has said, “A certain arrangement of lines resembles a cube; another arrangement looks like an angel. But essentially they are nothing other than arrangements of lines.”
Although he does not acknowledge a debt to or even a particular interest in European Baroque art, Puri’s work has some Baroque qualities; not the least is its power to evoke awe in the spectator. In most of his recent paintings intense light illuminates the visual field as if from within, a notable link with Italian Baroque artists’ attempts to represent infinite, all-permeating, all-embracing energy often emanating from the heavens. One of the greatest, Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) delighted in combining diverse materials in a single work of art. Like him, Puri employs “a hybrid of techniques, symbols, and various mediums…”. Like the astonishing Baroque muralists, he delights in the physicality of paint and its power to suggest the ineffable. Like them, he addresses topics that are emotionally transcendent and spiritual, albeit from a Buddhist perspective. “My art is my means of identifying with the universe,” he has said.
Puri believes, “Even though you are in a world of duality of good and bad, black and white, you can step out of it. The thought of opposites is maya, illusion…. Each drop in the ocean may think it is a separate drop but that is an illusion.”
Puri’s goal: “I am hoping to create Oneness,” is ambitious but perfectly valid. Recognizing the constructed conventions of Western art, the inventors of abstract painting in the West felt that it could become a universal visual language. We could take these paintings of Puri’s as a primer. Just as the spatial field in the paintings oscillates between foreground and background, our visual consciousness can move from the superficial to the sublime. By evoking the potential of the Tenth Door, Puri looks beyond daily events to the struggles that we experience when trying to understand ourselves and our place in the universe. The Tenth Door reminds us of the illusory nature of death and the timeless potential to experience the wholeness and the duality of existence.
“Cada vez que una idea aparecía, encerrada en su collar de palabras, estallaba en mil ecos que se iban transformando como nube. Nunca más volví a pensar en línea recta, sino en complejas estructuras, laberintos donde a veces el efecto era anterior a la causa.”
La danza de la realidad. Alejandro Jodorowsky
“El amor, la sabiduría, la gracia, la inspiración: ¿cómo emprender la búsqueda de cosas que, en cierto modo, tienen que ver con desplazar las fronteras del propio ser hacia territorios desconocidos, con convertirse en otra persona?”
Una guía sobre el arte de perderse. Rebecca Solnit
PROFUNDA SUPERFICIE
El mundo del arte se despliega como un oxímoron: cárcel de libertades, prisión sin paredes, cadenas de la libertad. Desde que, a finales del s. XIX, los artistas desplegaron las alas de la lucha por ejercer su práctica artística por fuera del rígido corsé de la Academia, cada “avance” liberador se fue convirtiendo en una “academia alternativa” con normas y manifiestos, seguidores y detractores. Como un panal de abejas, la realidad del mundo artístico va construyendo sus celdas: donde termina una, colinda la siguiente hasta formar una compleja comunidad de criterios, prácticas y pareceres. Alrededor de la idea de expresión sin límites, libertad creadora y otras formas de hablar que sitúan al artista contemporáneo en un mundo de infinitas posibilidades, opera la cerca metálica de una serie de cánones cuya existencia no se puede negar. Se ha comparado el mundo del arte con una religión, se diría politeísta: hay dioses, sectas, dogmas, templos, santos, pontífices, que en sus creencias se unifican en una consensuada superficie por debajo de la cual se empieza a encontrar la aún más grande variedad de manifestaciones artísticas que coexisten hoy en día. Volviendo a los cánones, éstos, también se instalan en la mirada del espectador, quien, por lo general, deambula arraigado en la idea de la libertad de opinión. Aun así, frente a una obra de arte, lo que proporciona una primera red de auxilio, son las categorías, las etiquetas, una primera forma de “entender” lo que estamos viendo. Esto, lejos de ser una crítica habla de un comportamiento humano normal: se necesita estructura, parámetros, objetivos y orden. Aunque estemos hablando de la creatividad, que viene de otro mundo, uno sin límites, el aterrizaje de ésta es, en todo caso, entre meros mortales.
Como pintor abstracto, Antonio Puri (1966, Chandigarh, India) se topa con la primera e incómoda etiqueta; a pesar de esto, la abstracción misma constituye el inicio del descenso hacia la profundidad del significado. Es en este punto de partida, donde comienza un baile de interpretaciones entre la superficie y lo que encontramos por debajo de ésta. La obra, privada de literalidad, se convierte en un vehículo y receptáculo de espiritualidad y sanación personal compartida con quien quiere aceptar la invitación de perderse en un mar de vibración rojiza. Una de las primeras metáforas de las que habla Puri hace referencia a la liberación de las chaquiras de vidrio, - elemento común en la cultura de India y material dominante empleado por el artista, - del hilo que normalmente las une, simbolizando este último la religión que todo lo quiere controlar. Este gesto habla de un profundo deseo de libertad, de no ser controlado, de liberarse de las etiquetas que el mundo del arte impone. Este deseo de libertad, de no estar constreñido, recorre la producción del artista y por ende su forma de pensar y ver el mundo. Al haber vivido en varias culturas, Puri ha interiorizado el hecho de que cada convicción es relativa, susceptible de reinterpretación. También es consciente de que hay algunas cosas que son parte de una estructura necesaria, aunque ésta se quiera en ocasiones tapar. Con el vaivén del cambio y con la práctica artística como fuente de autoconocimiento, el artista ha encontrado sus propias estructuras, sus propias interpretaciones del mundo.
CURAR LA RAÍZ
Uno de los conceptos que podemos revisar a través de su trabajo es el de Tantra, palabra que da título a la presente exposición. Encontramos una interpretación hindú, referente a la energía sexual del chakra raíz, la fuerza de la vida, que se encuentra en la base de la columna; una segunda acepción sería la budista, referente al paso del alma por todas las vidas hasta lograr el moksha, la iluminación o liberación espiritual; por último está lo que Tantra significa para Puri: para él es una forma de meditación que lo conecta con la raíz, con la tierra como fuente para curar la energía durante el confinamiento obligatorio en tiempos de la pandemia del Covid-19. La pieza Cien días de Tantra responde precisamente a esto: cien bastidores cubiertos por miles de chaquiras, colocadas una a una, reflejan diferentes tonos de rojo, siendo este el color del chakra raíz. Durante esta situación de cuarentena, Puri ha realizado una obra por cada día de encierro hasta llegar a cien, número con un significado especial para él. Todas están hechas con el mismo material, proyectan el mismo color en distintas tonalidades y representan una forma circular dentro del cuadrado del bastidor; en esta unidad minimalista cada una tiene una vibración flotante particular; hace pensar en Rothko y en su deseo de situar al espectador es una situación de emotiva contemplación e introspección espiritual. Es, en últimas, una abstracción del Tantra y en su multiplicidad un reflejo de la posibilidad de cada individuo de re-interpretar y apropiarse de lo que ya ha sido definido. Al abrir la interpretación de la obra al plano espiritual y de autoconocimiento, la mirada puede perderse en los detalles, la profundidad, las sombras y buscar el significado en el interior, más allá de la ayuda racional de las etiquetas. Hace pensar en la libertad de conciencia sobre la que escribió el filósofo Spinoza en un momento en el que los reinos europeos de la modernidad querían ejercer un monopolio sobre la misma. Si bien la libertad de conciencia, en términos religiosos, es algo que en una parte del mundo se da por hecho, es interesante trasladar esta idea a la apreciación estética; todavía está ligada a un conocimiento previo, a un bagaje intelectual. Frente al temor de no saber qué pensar, al miedo de no entender, Puri ofrece una vía de inmersión en la libertad y la profundidad de uno mismo. La superficie de la obra nos lanza a nuestro propio interior donde podemos explorar los límites de éste.
ASUMIR SIN MIEDO
Otras obras que nos facilitan la entrada al proceso y al pensamiento del artista son las que hacen referencia a la serie Lengua negra. Estas palabras conforman una expresión que en India se refiere a alguien que hace profecías; en principio, no tiene una buena connotación y es visto por los supersticiosos como algo negativo. Desde pequeño, Puri oyó que le decían así: lengua negra. Después de haberlo vivido con miedo y rechazo, Puri consigue aceptar que en realidad es algo único que debe abrazar. Así surge la idea de hacer visible lo que no se quiere ver y con ella la serie de obras arriba mencionada. Otra forma de profundizar más allá de la superficie. Lengua negra es una declaración de un artista que asume su identidad como individuo y como pintor: instalaciones de múltiples cuadros trabajados con chaquiras y acrílico, mostrando su reverso y laterales desnudos, todo aquello que normalmente borramos de la pintura. La “lengua negra” sale de la pared hasta el suelo, desplegando, - como un abanico, - todas las huellas del proceso pictórico, el esqueleto que sostiene la práctica pictórica, como las vigas que impiden que una casa se derrumbe. Esas estructuras que bajan al mismo ritmo geométrico hacen pensar en Donald Judd. Como artista, la práctica en ocasiones conlleva el mismo oxímoron del inicio: aunque como artista contemporáneo quiera ser libre, es imposible no tener referentes, es inevitable citarlos, honrarlos, pero paralelamente, se inicia un camino personal en el que uno debe perderse por todos aquellos senderos transitados con anterioridad a través de los cuales se empieza a construir uno pavimentado de honestidad y con identidad propia. Más allá de la primera impresión, las obras esconden pensamientos, procesos, oraciones, emociones y más. A través Lengua negra Antonio Puri, invita a mirar en las entrañas del artista, pero también de la tradición pictórica.
Por último y volviendo al contexto actual de la pandemia que azota al mundo, Tantra pone ante el público un proceso de sanación personal que es a la vez una invitación a tomar conciencia de nuestro propio proceso. La enfermedad pone en jaque los sistemas conocidos, que hasta hace poco dábamos por hecho, desde lo cotidiano hasta lo profesional, dándonos de bruces con una aproximación de la Teoría del Caos: una pequeña variación en el sistema puede provocar que, en un punto, en su comportamiento sea impredecible. Independientemente de la forma exterior, la estructura interior necesita, ahora más que nunca, estar bien sólidamente fundada.
Copyright © 2025 Art of Antonio Puri - All Rights Reserved.
We use cookies to analyze website traffic and optimize your website experience. By accepting our use of cookies, your data will be aggregated with all other user data.