By way of all these resources, Antonio Puri explores materials, forms and procedures that point reflexively towards him. Each of his works is a way of exposing himself in his perpetual fight against the attachments - the ties, the associations – to ideas and places he wants to detach from.
Antonio Puri: From Chandigarh to Bogota
by Rodrigo Alonso
Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
The work of Antonio Puri accounts for his migrant status. Born in Chandigarh (North of India), raised at the foot of the Himalayas, formed in the United States, and finally settled in Bogotá, the artist refuses to be identified with any specific context or geography to claim an existence detached from the impositions of an identity.
This condition is reflected in essentially hybrid works, in which different materials and cultural references merge, dialogue, interact or stress. Each piece is a meeting place for all these elements that have the subjectivity of the artists as unique point of confluence. That’s why Puri ensures that his work is rather narcissistic, and that it is only explained in relation to his own life and experience. "Everything I do has to do with me - he says - not with people, places or things".
This radical singularity unfolds in personal connections that link historical data, daily events, the idiosyncrasies of the places in which he has lived, cultural legacies and even his own body. The images, the formal configurations, the techniques, the materials and the textures of his works acquire their meaning when they are associated with him. Art and life are intercepted here not in the exaltation of the public sphere - as happened in the 1960s - but in the rediscovery of the intimate and its expressive possibilities.
In recent years, Puri has been revisiting the work of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, author of the urban design of his hometown. In fact, Chandigarh is the only community in the world that concreted the ideas of the renowned architect, who projected the organizations of numerous cities on the planet - including Bogotá - without being able to carry them out. In his humanist conception, Le Corbusier proposes the construction of spaces and buildings with a human scale, in contact with the cosmos and with nature, that enhance life in common. But for this to happen, he considers it necessary to purge individual desires. This is stated in the mandate that bequeathed the inhabitants of the Indian city: "The objective of this edict is to enlighten the present and future citizens of Chandigarh about the basic concepts of planning of the city so that they become its guardians and save it from whims of individuals."
The Lecorbusian architecture uses concrete as a fundamental building material. Because of this, Chandigarh is a city made up of gray tones, which contrast with the colors of nature and people. In 2016, Antonio Puri held an exhibition there titled I Love the Beauty of Gray, in which, in addition to paying homage to his place of origin, he incorporated gray as the predominant color, endowing it with personal and metaphorical qualities.
For his first solo exhibition in Colombia, Puri decides to adopt Le Corbusier as a symbolic bridge. Considering that the design of Chandigarh is immediately subsequent that of Bogotá, he imagines the Swiss architect projecting many of his ideas and utopias for this city in its Asian counterpart. A monumental work made especially for this exhibition integrates both designs, establishing an unusual connection between two sites that have very little in common, except for vital, creative and imaginary links, driven by an architect in the last century and by an artist of ours.
One of the characteristics of Antonio Puri's work is its composition in superimposed layers, which are at the same time material, cultural and symbolic. His canvases and papers have a thickness that invites a reading in depth. By means of a special technique, the traces, the layers of paint, the textures, the transparencies, build a complex surface that enables two kinds of approaches: a distant one, which in general is presented as a more or less liberated abstraction, and another one, that reveals an infinity of subtleties and details. To all this, some significant elements are added, such as the craftsmanship of the papers, the mandalas, the architectural plans, sometimes a few words. In the series Homeless, this word summarizes ideas about displacements, the diaspora, the impossible identity; in its realization, the artist uses a gold coating that refers, at the same time, to the obsession with this mineral characteristic of Indian culture and the legendary lost city of El Dorado.
One of the signs that appears with insistence is a rope or its spectral trace, which alludes, according to the artist, to the numerous ties that constitute us as human and social beings (from the umbilical cord to family ties, religious rituals, sexual games, certain aesthetic practices, etc.). Puri questions these attachments, prefers to ignore all kinds of ties, but at the same time recognizes their social place. Hence his adoption of the dialectical approach - attachment / detachment - when reflecting on some issues that involve them, and especially, on identity.
The majority of Puri's works are organized in dynamic series, which respond to contingent reasons rather than to a formal logic. My Soul Has Many Shadows, for example, is composed of 44 pieces, a number that corresponds to the years of life that the artist had when producing it. The50series emerged six years later, when he reached that age. Today he is carrying out a new set of works that is titled 100 lives, and that continues in process. This somewhat arbitrary perspective in the configuration of the series, separates it from the modernist practice that saw in serial work a way to purge all traces of individualism. Puri, on the other hand, establishes vital connections with his works, which do not hide a certain irreverent, capricious or ludic side.
The artist also vindicates the vitality of painting despite the announcements about its death; however, it also experiments with its limits. In a group of constructions realized with united frames, it transmutes the bidimensionality of the pictorial space into structures destined to the three-dimensional world. In these pieces, canvases become true "supports". The surfaces reserved for visual representation are obstructed and the interest moves towards the sculptural volume. Satirically, both Black Tongueand Double Black Tongueare paintings that erect their own wall, which makes them autonomous. Their visual configuration is an enigma; only the traces impregnated on the edges of the frames are visible. Their use as constructive modules draw attention to their concrete materiality. Columns and walls also refer to the architectural language, in a new reference reminiscent of Le Corbusier's work.
installation at Elvira Moreno Gallery in Bogota, Colombia, 2018
Copyright Antonio Puri 2020. All rights reserved.