Antonio Puri

Excerpt from essay by William Zimmer, Art Critic NYC

Exhibition at Noyes Museum, NJ

Puri grew up in the foothills of the Himalayas, in India, and moved to the United States in the early 80’s. His schooling and travels have taken him to Spain, Africa and other parts of the world as well. This amazing influence of cultural fusion has created a unique path of expression. It is no wonder that he is comfortable with creating a global aesthetic that transcends culture and ethnicity.

For his part, Puri believes in the potential and authority of abstraction. Like Abstract Expressionism, Puri’s work is marked by bold gestures, at least it seems so. But, unlike his predecessors, he isn’t painting just his immediate emotions. Rather he strategically plots a painting with a wide array of tools and methods. Process itself is part of his subject matter.

A major process is the “resist” technique used from ancient times by people in Tibet and India, called batik. It involves applying melted wax to areas of a fabric to prevent pigment from penetrating and coloring those areas. The effect is essentially that of an absence or a negative, but in Puri’s hands a resisted shape can look like an expressively painted brushstroke. Besides subterfuge like this, he welcomes accidents. Puri also uses string as a resist in his stretched canvases.

Each sector of one of Puri’s paintings has its own dense history, its own surface interest that can act independently of the composition as a whole. But the paintings have a remarkable unity. Puri’s work bridges the gap between the Eastern technique of batik and abstract expressionism, geometric with organic, flat with textured, and time with the timeless.

In a series entitled “Essence”, Puri has captured the core of his unique style by giving the viewer an X-Ray vision into his painting process. The paintings are subtle yet powerful, microscopic and macrocosmic, smooth and textured, accidental and controlled, all of which reflect the simultaneous birth and dissolution of the universe, leaving the viewer with a sense of oneness.