The colours of silence

Sohan Qadri's abstractions have a thought-provoking effect even on those who are not aware of their content, says ANJALI SIRCAR.

THE artist was born in a Sikh family in Punjab - simple farming people with no interest whatsoever in art. He was initiated into meditation when he was 10 years old in a small temple outside his village by his Sufi guru who would not talk philosophy but taught him silence. He felt a cosmic force in himself even while in school - the urge to go in for a deep search inside and find his own self. He never went anywhere to get influences or to influence anyone, and during his first show in 1970 assumed his Hindu-Muslim name Sohan Qadri.

Since 1963 when he "smuggled" himself out of India, he divided his time between Africa and Europe. The Copenhagen-based painter, 64, who had 40 one-man shows in Zurich, Vienna, London, Paris, New York and other major capitals, says: "It is time, I feel, that my work is introduced to art lovers in the East as there is a renewed interest in Eastern thought among Asians as they search for their spiritual roots."

Qadri's works reflect his grounding in both Hindu and Buddhist philosophy and before getting a master's degree in fine art from the renowned Government College of Art in Simla, the artist, then in his twenties, spent more than three years visiting and meditating in temples and monasteries in the Himalayas. For several months he lived with Tibetan monks imbibing their spiritual culture. Spirituality, as his paintings portray, has been the cornerstone of his creativity. "In my work," he emphasises, "the metaphysical and the esoteric both combine, enhancing the element of excellence - and since there is no pushing and pulling in the work the beauty reveals itself even to the ordinary eye."

To understand Qadri's art, one has to realise that his life, art and religion are closely interlinked into a significant union. His involvement with meditation has made him basically an unambitious artist not out to assert himself or his art. His abstractions have a thought-provoking effect even on those who are not aware of their content of yoga, tantra or potent silence. One could just relish or even ruminate over his paintings as pure art - play of colours, forms, textures and space. As Stockholm intellectual Lars Foxe remarked: "Sohan Qadri's paintings can be characterised as basically monochrome surfaces of loaded silence, reinforced by structural effects."

In the years between 1965 and 1975, Qadri experimented with oil on canvas as also oil on impasto on board but his major works thereafter have been on paper with a unique application of the intaglio technique. He told the story of how he came to the inevitable attraction of working on paper. About 10 years ago, he had some sheafs of paper lying in his studio and a printmaker, whom he knew, urged him to experiment on them with inks and dyes - use the paper as a living body to communicate and connect.

And once he turned to paper, its pervasive quality fascinated him. For him no print-making machines, no rollers and no etching needles. He made his own water-based inks, dyes and tints which were pure pigments and after dipping the paper in water, loaded the brush with colours of varying viscosities and painted in a manner that no colour mixed with each other. Or rather they repelled each other and ran on parallel lines and by the time he had packed up his brushes for the night and got up in the morning, his work was a finished piece of creation.

Basically, there are no forms in his paintings - just mass, lines and dispersion of colour. He makes incisions from behind the thick wet paper for the colour to filter in and as they form welts he would describe them as the "third dimension" in his work. While using colours like reds and blacks, or yellow configurations against purple, or white upon white or flaming yellow against an orange glow as the basis of the surface, the treatment of colour is heightened by the process of incision, allowing for a clear distinction of opposite elements of colour and texture entering the paper. They also reflect a distinct formlessness in contrast to the formal signs.

He would describe the linear trajectories in his paintings as vibrations or flow of energy from different parts of the two- dimensional space to a point. When the lines are vertical and rise very high, they correspond to a high level of ecstasy that permeates his whole work. When they are horizontal, they have a wave principle faster than sound, have the quality of meditation, make you silent and send you deep into your mind. Qadri says: "I am always tuned to my spirit. I just have to walk into my studio and I am already inspired. I have rarely wasted a painting. I never carry any material with me, only impressions, for true aesthetic perception is never geographically conditioned. The intuitive experience speaks all the languages and knows no formal boundaries."

In brief, Qadri believes in an inner and outer sphere of the life of man. He feels it as utterly essential for all of us to establish contact with this world within - with one's true self. In this world of light and shadow, there has to be this supreme union of matter with the spirit, transcending physical and narrow boundaries of space and definition. He believes that his usage of colours produces a resonance with his inner vision to make this a complete spiritual experience.

Evidently, he paints in a state of exaltation, as if from a deep and seemingly timeless space and this sort of ambience helps him share in a rhythm that springs from within the bowels of earth and resonates with the most distant reaches of stellar space. The rhythm is the heartbeat of his inner vision.

F. N. Souza in a rare reference to Qadri says: "Sohan Qadri may be a guru. He may be a tantrik sage. He may be anything extraneous to art. To me he is an artist par excellence. It is astonishing that many great Indian artists finally become saints. With Sohan Qadri, it seems to me, the reverse has occurred - but perhaps to revert again."

Sohan Qadri, born in 1932 in Punjab, who calls himself a "gypsy" and would count among his friends "free people such as hippies, poets and craftsmen - none of whom has a fixed home" - is a world-renowned artist with studios in Copenhagen, Toronto and Paris. He paints intensely, writes mystic poetry, conducts courses in advanced meditation from tantras as well as international workshops on aesthetics and metaphysics, and in addition to collecting awards, has been listed among the men of achievement - IBC, Casubridge, U.K..

His works are on show in Chennai at the Apparao Galleries (August 16 and 31).

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