Antonio Puri

Excerpt from the essay, Path of Technology and Cosmology at the Noyes Museum, 2006

A.M. Weaver, Curator

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.