There is a tranquil coexistence of binary opposites in SOHAN QADRI’s work displayed at Apparao Gallery, says Uma Nair
Apparao Gallery’s exposition of Sohan Qadri’s works on paper, on the TAP India platform, has about it the feel and expression of an artist who delighted in creating works in solitude. Qadri, the poet and Tantric guru, was an internationally acclaimed artist who was deeply engaged with spirituality and yoga. The famed art critic Donald Kuspit hailed Qadri to be "the pre-eminent aesthetic mystic of modernism."
These works on paper embrace your being like tableaus of luminous colour and viscosity; they also recall the lush palette of life in the rustic villages of India. Qadri, who in an interview at Kumar Gallery, told me “I am a dot’, abandoned abstract representation in his search for transcendence. These works have about them an evanescent grace of a floating object.
Qadri’s process of using paper and dye was unique and rare in terms of artistic exploration. He would bathe the paper in liquid and carve it in several stages while he applied inks and dyes with a brush. These works are at once imbued with vibrant and subtle hues. Qadri’s greatest insignia with the paper was the serrated surfaces that had about them an aura of energy and resilient rhythm. In the hands of Qadri, the seer and the thinker, the very nature of paper would be transformed into a three-dimensional medium.
His many years in the West gave him a practise and deeper understanding of abstraction than most Indian artists, who merely think it is representation. For him, the swathes of colour, deep folds and hints of a tiny dot somewhere in its domain had about it a spiritual fervour both rare and unseen. Most of his collectors were Europeans who understood the dynamics of design and often said he was India’s Rothko.
The largest number of Qadri’s shows were held by Kumar Gallery in Delhi and Sundaram Tagore in New York. There is a tranquil coexistence of binary opposites in Qadri’s work — male and female, known and unknown, physical and spiritual. It is more than a literal translation of the symbols of Oriental philosophy. When Qadri paints, he explains, “First I empty my mind of all images. They dissolve into primordial space. Only emptiness that I feel should communicate with the emptiness of the canvas."
Born into a Hindu-Sikh family, Qadri’s art was deeply influenced by a spiritual journey that began at a young age. He was initiated into yogic practice at the age of seven. As a teenager, he ran away to a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in search of higher truth. He spent days on end in remote temples in the Himalayas and Tibet. The isolation, he experienced at that time, was one of his influences to paint. Later in life, he became fascinated with Sufism and Vajrayana Buddhism, which became potent sources of inspiration for later works.
The exhibition can be viewed at www.theartplatformindia.com