ART
In search of the self
ADITI DE
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This catalogue lends us insights into an unusual life.
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Seeker: The Art of Sohan Qadri, Robert Thurman, Betty Said, Donald Kuspit and others, Mapin Publishing/ Sundaram Tagore Gallery, 2004, p.134, hardcover, price not stated.
SOHAN QADRI cannot be accommodated within formulaic definitions or bracketed by movements. For, the Copenhagen-based, celebrated artist happens to double as a poet and Vajrayan Tantric guru, who has led a peripatetic existence.
This catalogue, brilliantly designed by Paulomi Shah, distinguished by the hallmarks of Mapin quality publishing, lends us insights into an unusual life. Qadri's story begins as that of a spiritually-inclined boy from the Punjabi village of Chachoki, drawn to a yogi and a Sufi master in his neighbourhood. A boy who flees to Tibet, in defiance of his mother's dictates. His saga next takes in an apprenticeship to a Jalandhar photographer, followed by Qadri's discovery of Ara, Hebbar and Dave in Bombay. Once enrolled in the Simla College of Art, Qadri comes under the spell of Satish Gujral, just back from the latter's formative Mexican foray.
First solo show
Who was Qadri's first patron? None other than Dr. Mulk Raj Anand, who was visiting Phagwara. This triggers Qadri's first solo show in Chandigarh. His collectors in New Delhi included the Belgian consul, besides the Canadian and French ambassadors.
Among the highlights of Qadri's life are a string of happenstances. Such as his sell-out show at Nairobi. And a chess session with surrealist Rene Magritte. And a 1966 show at the Gallery Arnaud in Paris with Pierre Soulages, George Michaux, Jean Paul Riepal and Louis Fatoux (one wishes the names of Viswanadhan V. and Akkitham Narayanan had not been misspelled in this passage, though).
Then opens another incredible chapter. Qadri settles into the villa of an eccentric Danish aristocrat to paint for the next 18 years. Only to later co-found the free city of Christianna, outside Copenhagen. In 1973, the artist meets another major patron in Cologne — Nobel laureate Heinrich Boll.
Here's how Boll sums up the artist: "Sohan Qadri with his painting liberates the word meditation from its fashionable taste and brings it back to its proper origin, uninfluenced by western propaganda, misunderstandings and corruption".
Amidst the impeccably reproduced 83 colour and 26 black-and-white images, we come across abstracted forays into perceptions of sunyata and bija, as the tantrika plunges into the world within, rendered as oils on canvas or, more dramatically, with ink and dye on paper.
Qadri's colour palette is intrinsically Indian — sindoor reds, Kancheepuram silk blues, fireball oranges. Each rhythm-fused incision is restrained, each tear in the backdrop precise, each serration a qualitative enhancement of the paintings' meditative quality, infused with Kundalini essence. Perhaps these meld his Indian aesthetics with a Scandinavian reserve. For, his art comes through as universal, formless and potent, not easy to disengage from.
Man with an aura
No wonder New York-based artist F.N. Souza wrote of Qadri in 1976: "He is a saintly man from whom an aura emanates. Try and expose him as a phony saint, and he emerges as a great artist. Try and put down his art as gimmick and he comes across as a profoundly learned man. Try to debunk his learning and he proves to possess all three — saintliness, aesthetics and wisdom".
With endorsements from Boll and Souza, Qadri's art continues on its dramatic course. Besides his life story retold by Sundaram Tagore, whose New York-based gallery produced this catalogue to mark an exhibition titled "Dissolving Contours: The Art of Sohan Qadri," the other pieces that flank it are equally brilliant. Be they from Robert Thurman, a former Buddhist monk and director of New York's Tibet House. Or Betty Said of the Art Institute of Chicago. Or art critic Donald Kuspit. Each shares profound thoughts that illuminate and catalyse the experience.
One might have had reservations about reviewing this catalogue, no matter how distinctive, without access to Qadri's original work. But, fortuitously enough, Chennai's Apparao Galleries held a sharing of his paintings in February 2005. That rounds out the artistic encounter in the eyes of this reviewer.
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