Antonio Puri



Monumental - Antonio Puri

…the good artists are those who only obey their instincts.

Richard Serra

Antonio Puri’s artwork approach to a kind of work that we can define as an expanded field of painting, since it is not only about works of art created from pigments mixed with other binding media applied on the surface of the canvas, but it uses unorthodox techniques of art, particularly batik (traditional technique in some regions of the African continent or in countries as India, Malaysia, Indonesia or Thailand, among others); an ancestral practice that consists of applying layers of wax or hot paraffin on the surface of the fabric to block the fields, points or lines that do not wish to dye, reserving the base color to prevent the penetration of the pigmentation, which is applied by immersion of the textile .

This non-pictorial resource allows this creator to move between the construction of a geometric abstraction of a rational nature and the atmospheres creation that give depth in the sense of lyric, in other words, conceive pieces of a constructivist neo-plasticism in which structure and design forms, forces and rhythms, that far from any rigid or radical intention, provide us an emotional richness.

In each one of the art pieces the artist reduces the forms to precise lines and colors to open spaces, in which only the elementary prevails in an attempt to reach the essence, thus, creating harmonious structures of stained fields, so we can say that we are in front of one of the artists who formally finds the tool to develop metaphysical thinking in a more accurate way.

His geometric style, attached to abstraction, is characterized by planning the painting on rational principles of objectivity and universality, and therefore, defending the use of neutral elements that give clarity, precision and balance to the work, to achieve a composition logically structured in which creates an introspective visual language, in which neither the artwork in its totality nor any of its parts, represent objects of the visible world, but visual paroxysms of great impact.

Antonio Puri creates new compositions by demanding ranges by leaving the pictorial mixture to become an independent factor that is incorporated into the construction or phases in the process of textile pigmentation, making this traditional technique, an autonomous and independent artistic discipline, the batik.

His work responds to a mandate of absolute sincerity and correspondence with his non-theistic or dharmic philosophical practices; as well as the belief in which the artist as an individual expresses himself through the graphic-pictorial plane through gesture and physical action; what results in canvases whose stylistic categorization can be linked around two basic inclinations: the emphasis on dynamic and energetic movement, as well as the contrast with the reflective approach of the geometric shapes that stand out in the fields of color, giving result to an organic geometry.

His works are characterized also by a vigorous rhetoric, generally of monumental dimensions, with large areas of bright colors and minimum elements in which naturalistic figuration is eliminated. A conception of territoriality or the surface of the painting as all over (coverage of the surface) to signify an open field without limits on the surface of each piece.

Each piece becomes an infinite space in which aerial shapes are noticed through the presence of planes, stripes or curves that extend until they meet again at their ends, in what we can define as circles inside circles or concentric circles, granting depth and constant movement to the plastic image. Recurrent circular forms, whose significations refer us to the idea of perfection, equality, the absence of division or distinction; and nevertheless, the integration with the surface by means of stains that invade the pure fields of the circular forms, the idea of unity persists, of the absolute that contains the other forms and that symbolize the last stage of interior perfection of the being.

This is how Antonio Puri deals frontally with the pictorial space, without hierarchy between the different parts of the canvas that move towards its limits and whose gestures of its atmospheres fall within the material and emotive tendencies of the so-called lyrical abstraction, since they build as free forms in an interior need of the artist.

Rafael Alfonso Pérez y Pérez.

Installation from Museo de Arte del Tolima, Ibague, Colombia 2019