Antonio Puri

Paintings     Biography     Artist Statement     Exhibitions     Bibliography     Critical Essay     Installations     Contact

More history in the making

By R.B. Strauss 

October 24, 2002

One of the more dynamic and historically astute exhibitions of this new art season is "Pollock to Puri: Five Decades Later," featuring paintings by Antonio Puri at the DaVinci Art Alliance 704 Catherine Street, in Philadelphia through October 31.

Gallery hours are every Wednesday of the month, from 6 to 8 p.m. and every Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. You can also make an appointment to see the work besides regular hours by calling (215) 829-0466--and you would do well to make the call.

Puri takes the basic "drip" technique of Pollock and binds it to a process that yields more cosmic results, inasmuch as a circle is the centerpiece of every one of the pieces in the exhibition, each one suggesting distant planets yet to be discovered. Many of the paintings are mixed media, and also utilize wax. However, these are not encaustic works, as the artist scrapes away the wax to leave far different results.

"Dharma I," first of a series, is a roughhewn work filled with kinetic movement bound up in subtle ease. The composition plays out over four circles in a vertical row, and there is something here of a scroll, a star chart of the soul. From top to bottom, each one seems to be the phases of a world, something seen through a telescope over the course of eons' worth of ages.
The Pollock reference is in the "drips" Puri offers, and they are more like cascading streams of gas or liquid, a cosmological ectoplasm against the background of beige strengthened with, of all things, coffee for added texture.

The illusion of dimension is paramount in "Before VII," another number in a further series. This is all incandescent greens shot through with various shades of blue, and this layering adds warmth to the piece (no matter the cool palette). Bundles of color are swarmed through this sphere like a network of rivers on a large scale--like clusters of nerve junctions on another level.
As for the sense of a convex reality, this is arrives in the pull of lines against thicker fields of paler blue, which serves as something that affects one's perception of the piece in a purely optical regard.

Puri is known for working large, and the expansive "The One I Missed" is a mural-sized masterpiece. Here, the image of the circle is doubled on a more immediate basis as the two central spheres are joined. However, since there is no interface where they do so, this suggests mitosis, the biological process of cells dividing.

This is one of the more atmospheric pieces despite its size, as the palette is at once incandescent and subtle, with explosive patches of shifting shades coursing across the blue and green sections of the spectrum, as one hue surrenders to another in visual harmony.

Orange and black predominate in "Element I," which of course is serendipitous in regards to Halloween. Featuring a single sphere in the middle of the piece set against a black background, the presence of wax is well apparent here. As for the Pollockian "drips," they seem more molten than anything else, even through the wax has been reduced to the thinnest of scrims to leave the circle itself something embedded deep in the earth--or the night sky. The black drips that run across the pale beige circle are like solar coronas or flares, though of a universe counter to our own, a place where antimatter matters.

The interrelationship between these paintings is an exquisite dance that goes far beyond the general parameters of old School Abstract Expressionism in general and Jackson Pollock in particular to form a postmodern aesthetic grounded in how singular vision yields fresh truth.

R. B. Strauss is a Philadelphia based art critic who writes regularly for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Art Matters, Philadelphia Style Magazine and other local newspapers and magazines.