Artiste Sohan Qadri pushed the language of art beyond its boundaries to develop his work. He is best-known for his luminous, dye-infused works, which explore the notion of emptiness, says Uma Nair
When you look at the paper dyed works of poet, painter and Tantric yogi, Sohan Qadri, it is like stepping into the world of a seer, who launched an odyssey of abstraction that none could envisage. Sundaram Tagore Gallery’s show of Sohan Qadri comes at a time when abstraction in India has been reduced strokes of geometry and colour.
Modernism’s mystic
Transcendence and tranquility both flirt with each other in these presentation. Critic Donald Kuspit was accurate in his assessment of Qadri as “the pre-eminent aesthetic mystic of modernism.”
Sohan Qadri was born in Chachoki, Punjab, in 1932 and died in 2011, Toronto, Canada. He is perhaps best-known for his luminous, dye-infused works, which explore the notion of emptiness or voids. Relying on a language of orifices and elongated paths, Qadri abandoned representation in search of transcendence. He was particularly inspired by Vajrayana or Tantric Buddhism, which emphasises the notion of shunyata or emptiness. Qadri’s minimalist compositions on paper are symbolic of this void from which seeds arise. The seeds are primordial symbols representing the self in the universe, the notion of creation and a sexual union.
The state of being
Painting for Qadri was part of a meditative sojourn. Deeply influenced by tantric practices, abstraction for him was focussed on the embodiment of his philosophical and spiritual state of being.
“When I start on a painting, I, first, empty my mind of all images. They dissolve into primordial space. Only emptiness, I feel, should communicate with emptiness of the canvas,” Qadri had said once. Though he started painting in the impasto style using oil and acrylic on canvas, he discovered his spiritual medium in inks and dyes. He used the heavy Van Guelder paper — used for intaglio printing — and treated it to create a consistency ideal for ink and dye dispersion.
Transcending time
Qadri would bathe paper in acid-free water. Once it was swollen with liquid, he would rhythmically score the surface with various gouging and cutting tools, and then apply inks and dyes. Using the thick intaglio paper and carving it in stages achieved a sculptural effect. Imbued with vibrant hues, the serrated surfaces possess a strong sense of energy and rhythm. In Qadri’s hands, the very nature of paper was transformed from a flat, two-dimensional surface into a three-dimensional medium.
Spiritual quest
Born into a Hindu and Sikh family, Qadri’s art is deeply influenced by a spiritual journey, which began at a young age. As a teenager, he ran away to a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in search of higher truth. He spent days in remote temples in the Himalayas and Tibet. The isolation he experienced at that time influenced him to paint. Later in life, he became fascinated with Sufism and Vajrayana Buddhism, which became potent sources of inspiration for later works.
Qadri pushed the language of art beyond its boundaries to develop his work. This paved the way for truly contemporary ink dyes that spoke of mystic moorings with a suggestive source of a third-dimension.
He owed as much to Western experimentation as to Eastern tradition. His work was unique because it was a quest for his true self through Tantric yoga and silent meditation. Throughout the course of his career, he interacted with an array of intellectual figures including the architect Le Corbusier, the surrealist painter René Margritte and the Nobel laureate Heinrich Böil. The visual dynamics of his colour fields bring home the deeper truths of his practise.