Antonio Puri



Antonio Puri

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.

Elizabeth Rogers

New York

Graduate of Harvard College, Harvard University (A.B.), Institut d’Etudes Politiques (C.E.P., Paris), and Institut des Civilisations et Langues Orientales (Matrise, Paris), Beijing and Fudan Universities (P.R.C.), and Yale University (M.A. and M.F.A.). She was the Assistant Director of the Museum at Japan Society (New York), the Director of the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art (New York), consultant to World Monuments Fund (New York), a consultant to the Museum at Tibet House (New Delhi), and a consultant to the Asoka Mission, New Delhi. Awarded fellowships and residencies, she has curated exhibitions across the world, written catalogues and lectured.

Installation from Government Museum and Art Gallery, Chandigarh, India, 2016

Elements of the Earth

Metaphysical Crimson Meditations

Innate harmonies, connecting broader dimensions of time and space, thus Art provides a means to express the imagination in non-grammatical ways not tied to the formality of spoken or written language. Antonio Puri’s creativity defies nomenclature, extending beyond definitions of attribution or “isms”. Exploring the elements, one view of these configurations, the Tantric view, relates these as fields through which all facets of nature manifest.

Another point on the circumferential dimensions of Puri’s life, “where adavaita(unity between individual and pure consciousness) has taken me”, this Tantrabody of work has evolved in his current abode of Bogota, Columbia. Ironically, this metropolitan site boasts an elevation akin to that of the lower Himalayas, envisioning echoes of the climatic realms of his childhood city of Chandigarh (Punjab, India).

Delving once again into this profundity of the melding of life and art, Puri has discovered another range of colours and energies. For not only had Charles-Edouard Jenneret-Gris (Le Corbusier, 1887-1963) briefly sojourned in Bogota prior to his fundamental project in creating/designing Chandigarh, Puri has found himself to be continuing his “self-exploration”, rather than the habitual definitions of mere external expression.

An extra-stellar form of meditation, this grounding in such intuitive energy has favoured the root chakra (Muladhara,Sanskrit, lit. root and basis of existence), and realms of the hues of red. This is considered the foundation of the “energy body”. It is also the seat of the red binduor subtle drop. Siddhis (Skt. magical powers of fulfillment) attest that mastery of this chakra mantra endows one with control over the Elements of the Earth, as well as knowledge of the Present, Past and Future. Similarly such an embrace of the root chakra results in a number of these works incorporating a shower of red beads.

Puri’s characteristic labourial creative process of layers of paint with beads and threads, continues in this intense red body of work, attesting to the non-dual significance of the Vedic concept of Adavaita. Puri cites the Sikh Guru Nanak (Baba Nanak, 1469-1539) as an inspiration. Founder of Sikhism and the first of the ten Sikh gurus, he believed that one would, “know the inside and the outside to realise the same.” As well, Guru Nanak emphasized that ‘the Everyday world is part of an infinite reality.”

To recover one’s past entails intense personal commitment and creative endeavour. Puri strives, in all of his work over time, to blend personal histories, cultural mythologies and an idiosyncratic repertoire to render works which conjure such multifold dimensions. As has been already documented, he invokes arduous processes to transform and then realize his visions.

Beyond the concrete map/journey, attesting to the potency of chromatics is the essence of what the artist and educator Josef Albers (d.1976) wrote in his seminal book Interaction of Color(Yale University Press, 1963): “In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is –as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.”

As cited regarding his panorama, his work and life, mind and existence are interwoven and self-reflective. Furthermore, within this body of work, reminiscent of earlier oeuvres, several pieces (la lengua negra) emanate from the wall escalating beyond customary dimensional parameters of painting. Once again, Puri challenges the mainstream limiting definitions. Here, the essence constructs and reconstructs, and explores the core of parallel interstices and realms.

This is how the power of contemplation and creativity encounter Mystery.

Elizabeth Rogers

Tantra exhibition at Museo Bolivariano of Contemporary Art, Santa Marta, Colombia