Antonio Puri
Antonio Puri: The Tenth Door Paintings
What is abstraction? To a naïve person, a mandala may appear to be an intriguing centered geometric design, yet it encodes a sophisticated philosophical system. It is a tool shaped for a particular activity (meditation). An electrocardiogram also might appear to be merely an interestingly varied rhythmic linear pattern, but the activity of the heart is there recorded to be deciphered by those who can interpret its meanings. It too is a tool. The polarities of meaning in these examples contrast pleasing or engaging visual arrangements with specific functional signs. But neither alternative cancels the other out.
Abstraction in painting and sculpture, it seems to me, is potentially something that encompasses polarities and transcends them. It can point to a cosmology or personal history or have a special meaning for someone, but most ambitiously it can hold the potential meanings of sign and design in tension, vibrating between possibilities to suggest a third overarching possibility, what Antonio Puri has described as a “non-dual duality or something without opposites in a work with opposites.”
Just like a mandala or an electrocardiogram, Puri’s paintings engage the basic issues of life and death and function within more than one narrow understanding. The ambitious scale and expansive physical gestures in much of Puri’s work facilitate the sense of an expanded enhanced vision: perhaps microscopic, perhaps cosmic. In some ways, large paintings are especially intimate because they create human experiential contexts. Puri’s paintings record the physicality of their making; they are in a sense partners in a dance.
Pouring and mingling paints, inks, and powders of varying viscosities and textures, Puri builds work that is intentionally simple and grounded in decipherable human activity. Often he incorporates novel materials. These are not random choices selected from what is at hand; these elements have been chosen for a reason. The current body of work, “The Tenth Door,” series is distinguished by applied sheets of newspaper. The haptic surface buckled and rippled when it absorbed successive fluid layers and has set into ruched strips. Glossy or matte, the now mostly obscured paper might be blistering paint or agitated water or eroded lines of carved text. The humble newsprint is permeated with paint, as if with light. It might be a veil between one state of being and another: sometimes seemingly solid and at other times, easily penetrated — even by a breeze. Most especially, the fragile lengths of material suggest a fine thin fabric, a shroud, perhaps a winding sheet or mummy wrappings, all metaphors consistent with the idea of the Tenth Door. This is the door to the highest perception, the door to infinity, and, most important, release from the cycle of reincarnate life. However one interprets this multilayered symbol, Tenth Door is always the last door.
The oblique evocations of death, reincarnation, and enlightenment that might be felt with regard to Puri’s use of newspaper, are reinforced by another perspective on the very same material. The newspaper tells of temporal events, transitory events. It is a common metaphor for all that is “yesterday’s news,” disposable or recyclable. The newspaper is a form of communication. Puri, however, chooses to obliterate, or overwrite its ephemeral messages, replacing them with a larger vision. Only occasional palimpsest fragments survive the massive pours, drips, cascades, rivulets and imprints of paint to remind us that passing moments are meaningful in their time.
Another unique and solemn material that appears in a few of these paintings is a small quantity of ash and bone from human cremation. Its presence is symbolic rather than aesthetic, as the quantity is so small as to be virtually invisible, impalpable.
Why is it here? Puri decided on this course after a great deal of thought. Now the essence and evanescence and rebirth of human life are literally one with the paintings. Puri enacted in material form the evolution of the spirit after death. Physical transformation and rebirth into another form occurs naturally when a body is returned to the earth through burial or cremation; but we don’t always consider that there is a comparable spiritual transformation. Puri firmly believes in reincarnation. He says, “‘Death,’ in quotation marks, is a misconception. The real death is our state of ignorance. I want to create an afterlife for those ashes to parallel the afterlife that we all experience.”
A striving for perfect attunement to the present characterizes the work of twentieth century Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock or his contemporary Helen Frankenthaler. Not surprisingly, these artists are associated with Zen Buddhism, a philosophy that advocates immersion in the present moment as a door to ultimate understanding. Frankenthaler (usually described as a post-painterly abstractionist) once told critic Barbara Rose that the kind of painting she wanted to make, “looks as if it were born in a minute.” Like Puri she is best known for poured, minimally manipulated paint.
Puri, who is himself a Buddhist, does not object to being linked to earlier abstractionists, but I suspect he sees such categories as red herrings. He shares Frankenthaler’s belief that, “Artists get into a state of working where there isn’t a lot of conscious mental control.”
For Puri, each series of paintings and each work within it grows from a specific broad metonymic category with a context of meaning. The series title, “The Tenth Door,” names the highest of the yogic chakras (usually described as nodes of spiritual power located in the human body). Each chakra can be envisioned as a spinning wheel linked to a color and a sound. Each has a purpose and is necessary to mental and physical health, but the chakras are also hierarchical.
Most mystical spiritual traditions share a similar vision. Life energy or prana (Sanskrit) or qi (Chinese) or ashe (Yoruban) or ruah (Hebrew) flows along the chakras. The purpose of meditation is to raise energy from the lower levels, which are more concerned with the physical body to the highest one, the Tenth Door, which is purely spiritual. In Puri’s paintings, flowing color and repeated circular forms, both layered and opening, might be interpreted as energy rising through the chakras toward the Tenth Door.
In a slightly different context, The Tenth Door is also described as a complement to the nine bodily orifices. They are physical and visible; the Tenth Door is hidden, non-material and most fully accessible through discipline and meditation. This portal opens to a state of enlightenment and bliss, infinite and eternal.
This particular series was born when Puri addressed the topic of birth, the creation of organic life. In a group of paintings related to the idea of ontogenesis, certain formal characteristics began to emerge as a response to his query: “How can I make a geometric form which is also organic?” He explains, “There was a separation in earlier paintings between organic shapes and geometric circles. It worked beautifully, but there wasn’t a true fusion. In art we may separate organic from geometric, but in life when we enlarge microscopic forms, we see the union of organic and geometric — also in nebulas and supernovas. The explosions create this beautiful organic material that totally dissolves into geometric form. It was compelling.
“Finally, I began thinking about the idea that when a cell divides, a spherical geometrical form splits and you have this enormous energy. It’s almost like a supernova. And for a moment the geometric and organic are joined. It was my Eureka! moment. I thought, ‘I’ve got to break the sphere but break it organically.’”
But the Eureka! insight did not immediately translate into paintings. Usually, Puri finds that obsession facilitates his work, but this time, he says, “something disturbed me. It seemed like I’d started the sentence but I didn’t know how to complete it.” He put the idea on the back burner and worked on other things.
Four years later he realized that his earlier thinking has been overly literal: “What was disturbing me was that I was [thinking] on a very physical level. I wasn’t allowing it to become ethereal.” He then understood that the idea of death as the end point of the initiation of life had disturbed him. He detoured from his initial insight about the dividing cell, to do a series of works directly addressing death. When his first attempt to “kill the canvas and create a new life” was completed, he set it aside to focus on relatively monochromatic work relating entirely to creation and rebirth. “To me the [earlier death-related] art was successful because when there’s life, there’s also death. It was a personal journey.” But, ultimately, the death paintings were not the answer Puri sought.
With the “Tenth Door” series, he re-engages the topic of material existence and physical death, approaching it from a spiritual point of view. These paintings are dominated by colors that tend toward rust (generally warm) and patina (generally cool), colors associated with the transformation of one material into another. Both rust and patination are forms of decay and of oxidation, which can be described as a very slow form of combustion. Thus, the colors most evident in this series may obliquely be related to cremation. They could metaphorically evoke the material rebirth of the physical body.
Puri’s interest in birth and death brings to mind the words of another contemporary abstractionist who is known for pouring and flinging arcs of paint. Pat Steir has considered the life/death conundrum for most of her career. She told Doris von Drat hen, “You only know that you are alive if you know that a life ends…. The fact of death defines life.” Puri has similarly observed, “When you look at a forest burning down, you see that new growth from the ashes can give rise to a whole new crop: samsara (the cycle of death and rebirth). Every forest has the same cycle.” He adds, “I find open-ended things more interesting.”
The twentieth century abstract painter and teacher Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) coined the term ”push/pull” to describe shifting spatial perceptions resulting from color and qualities of pigment. “It’s not the form that dictates the color, but the color that brings out the form,” Hofmann believed. Interestingly, his most admired series of paintings is somewhat related to Puri’s present series in its attempt to resolve geometric forms (rectangles and squares in Hoffmann’s case) with organic abstraction. Hoffman’s solution appears to simultaneously immerse and float flat painted rectilinear geometries within a sea of vigorous brush strokes. The bright solid colors open like windows and yet are always recognized by the viewer as simple areas of paint.
It’s often thoughtlessly said that Hofmann invented a technical phenomenon in painting (push/pull), but in truth he simply described it rather memorably. For hundreds of years painters have known that darker and cooler colors recede while lighter and warmer colors advance. In the Baroque period artists’ bold virtuoso manipulations of color and value enacted the drama of religious ecstasy or political power. Baroque artists loved to paint dramatic, burgeoning clouds and to exaggerate exuberant, billowing folds of drapery. They also deftly merged solid form with pools of shadow or splashes of light and contrasted large shapes with subtle details. This lively visual experience convinces the viewer as efficiently and predictably when nothing is represented. As Pat Steir has said, “A certain arrangement of lines resembles a cube; another arrangement looks like an angel. But essentially they are nothing other than arrangements of lines.”
Although he does not acknowledge a debt to or even a particular interest in European Baroque art, Puri’s work has some Baroque qualities; not the least is its power to evoke awe in the spectator. In most of his recent paintings intense light illuminates the visual field as if from within, a notable link with Italian Baroque artists’ attempts to represent infinite, all-permeating, all-embracing energy often emanating from the heavens. One of the greatest, Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) delighted in combining diverse materials in a single work of art. Like him, Puri employs “a hybrid of techniques, symbols, and various mediums…”. Like the astonishing Baroque muralists, he delights in the physicality of paint and its power to suggest the ineffable. Like them, he addresses topics that are emotionally transcendent and spiritual, albeit from a Buddhist perspective. “My art is my means of identifying with the universe,” he has said.
Puri believes, “Even though you are in a world of duality of good and bad, black and white, you can step out of it. The thought of opposites is maya, illusion…. Each drop in the ocean may think it is a separate drop but that is an illusion.”
Puri’s goal: “I am hoping to create Oneness,” is ambitious but perfectly valid. Recognizing the constructed conventions of Western art, the inventors of abstract painting in the West felt that it could become a universal visual language. We could take these paintings of Puri’s as a primer. Just as the spatial field in the paintings oscillates between foreground and background, our visual consciousness can move from the superficial to the sublime. By evoking the potential of the Tenth Door, Puri looks beyond daily events to the struggles that we experience when trying to understand ourselves and our place in the universe. The Tenth Door reminds us of the illusory nature of death and the timeless potential to experience the wholeness and the duality of existence.
Robin Rice
2008
1. Doris von Drathern: Pat Steir: Installations. Milano, Italy. 2006. p. 37.
2. Von Drathern. p. 36.
3. Wassily Kandinsky (1886-1944) is credited with making the first abstract painting in 1910 following his accidental discovery that one of his own representational paintings looked just as good and was just as meaningful upside-down as it was when right side up
