Essay by Miriam Seidel
Growing up in wide open spaces may be a good way for an abstract painter to begin. Jackson Pollock grew up in Wyoming, Mark Rothko spent his youth in Oregon, Agnes Martin grew up in Western Canada, Washington State and Oregon. Antonio Puri lived for many years of his childhood at the base of the Himalayas, and the imprint of the immensity of the landscape there can surely be felt in his work. That vast mountain range may not be explicit in his paintings, but the overarching circles that anchor his compositions have a similar hugeness of scale and inescapable presence.
Gazing up at mountains, and the mystery of their transformation under different atmospheric conditions, may also encourage an appreciation of ambiguity. The interplay of layers in Puri’s paintings seems to reflect such a heightened awareness. In one recent series, it’s hard to predict which element will be primary: the underlying circular form, or the veil of dripped lines that cover it. In works like Before 4 and Before 5 (both 2002), the crisp circumference of the white circle snaps into awareness first, looking behind black and whte drips like a huge moon seen behind branches and clouds. In another work from this series, Before 2 (2002), the wash of drips takes over like a waterfall, obscuring whatever form lies underneath. Puri’s many layers of drips and washes are held in a subtle, dynamic balance, and endless play of hiding and revealing, that pulls the viewer in for further contemplation.
Puri seems to have reversed the usual associations of the iconographic elements in his paintings; instead of soft curves and hard lines, he defines his circular forms with sharply delineated curves, and his loosely unpredictable lines drip over the under layers with a soft chaotic complexity. Contrasting associations begin to interweave in the same way his disparate layers seem to move in and out among each other.
There is a sense of monumentality in Puri’s work that may also owe something to his early experience. The square, four-by-four foot size of his Before painting, and even the slightly larger series After, is not overwhelmingly large, but these works achieve a spacious feeling that suggests a greater size. Yet Puri does allow himself to work much larger at times, notably in the series of unstretched canvases he has made every year to commemorate his son’s birthday. In some of these paintings - one of the largest so far, “5” (2003), is twelve by ten feet - he also employs wax, to create further surface elaborations. The molten wax is dripped on in gestural curves -not the stately washes and drips of his final layers, but in the more frenetic, Pollock like loops with which he often starts his work. (Although that initial layer is usually completely covered, it often imparts a ghostly textural layer below the visible surface activity.) After painting other layers over them, he then irons all of the wax off, using his own modified batik technique. The resulting, frangemented and interweaving play of negative and positive elements imparts a charged energy to these surfaces. The jittery, white lost-wax markings on the blue double circles of the The One I Missee (2001), for example, give off the air of an electrical storm.
At this greater scale, the circles also multiply and interact. In Stretched Too Far (2003), the two mottled hemispheres of a circle pull apart in a kind of cell division, trailing a webwork of drips between them. In another recent painting, Mitosis of the Soul (2003), two separate circles readiatie energetic filaments of wiped-down paint, like thicker versions of the trace-marks of wax.
Even while suggesting readings as forms of microscopic life, these works retain their monumentality. In fact, the massiveness of the forms, and the corresponding delicacy of textural and linear detail that covers them, makes the association with planetary bodies hard to resist, although Puri does not avow any intention toward that reading. Once seen and felt, monns, earths and other planets seem to be everywhere.
Among his smaller works, there are paintings that project an altar-like-calm, particularly ones such as Mini Dharma 1 (2003) that hang in a thin vertical format, like a Japanese hanging scroll painting. On the other hand a painting like Kilimanjaro (2003), with its earth tones and raw forms, seems about to burst its edges with raw vitality.
Puri’s symmetrical formats also call to mind the mandala that is a part of the traditional religious art of India and Tibet. In works such as blue-hued Before 9 (2002), and Yellow and Green (both 2003), the reduction to a single color serves as a further unifier, beyond the mandala-like circular composition and symmetrical format. The lacy, fractal detail of Puri’s drips can be seen as activating the surface in the same way the demons and Bodhisattvas compel the eye and mind in a Tibetan thangka. In fact, the elaboration of his different layers, each with its own demands, and the multiplying interactions of the layers as they build up, can be taken as a kind of contemplative practice. It may be that this is the source of the compelling effect of standing before one of the paintings: sometimes serene, sometimes intense, they always envelop the viewer, offering entry into a particularly focused experience. As Puri seems to turn more openly to his artistic sources in his most recent works, as is suggested in titles like Summit, Jaipur and Mini Dharma (all 2003), this effect can only grow stronger.
Miriam Seidel is a corresponding editor for Art in America.
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