Antonio Puri

What is abstraction?  To a naïve person, a mandala may appear to be an intriguing centered geometric design, yet it encodes a sophisticated philosophical system.  It is a tool shaped for a particular activity (meditation).  An electrocardiogram also might appear to be merely an interestingly varied rhythmic linear pattern, but the activity of the heart is there recorded to be deciphered by those who can interpret its meanings. It too is a tool. The polarities of meaning in these examples contrast pleasing or engaging visual arrangements with specific functional signs. But neither alternative cancels the other out.

Abstraction in painting and sculpture can point to a cosmology or personal history or have a special meaning for someone, but most ambitiously it can hold the potential meanings of sign and design in tension, vibrating between possibilities to suggest a third overarching possibility.  Just like a mandala or an electrocardiogram, Puri’s paintings engage the basic issues of life and death and function within more than one narrow understanding. The ambitious scale and expansive physical gestures in much of Puri’s work facilitate the sense of an expanded enhanced vision: perhaps microscopic, perhaps cosmic. In some ways, large paintings are especially intimate because they create human experiential contexts. Puri’s paintings record the physicality of their making; they are in a sense partners in a dance.

Growing up in wide-open spaces may be a good way for an abstract painter to begin. Jackson Pollock grew up in Wyoming; Mark Rothko spent his youth in Oregon; Agnes Martin grew up in Western Canada, Washington state and Oregon. Antonio Puri lived for many years of his childhood at the base of the Himalayas, and the imprint of the immensity of the landscape there can surely be felt in his work. That vast mountain range may not be explicit in his paintings, but the overarching circles that anchor his compositions have a similar hugeness of scale and inescapable presence.
Puri seems to have reversed the usual associations of the iconographic elements in his paintings: instead of soft curves and hard lines, he defines his circular forms with sharply delineated curves, and his loosely unpredictable lines drip over the underlayers with a soft, chaotic complexity. Contrasting associations begin to interweave in the same way his disparate layers seem to move in and out among each other. 

Pouring and mingling paints, inks, and powders of varying viscosities and textures, Puri builds work that is intentionally simple and grounded in decipherable human activity.  Often he incorporates novel materials. These are not random choices selected from what is at hand; these elements have been chosen for a reason. The current body of work, “The Tenth Door,” series is distinguished by applied sheets of newspaper. The haptic surface buckled and rippled when it absorbed successive fluid layers and has set into ruched strips. Glossy or matte, the now mostly obscured paper might be blistering paint or agitated water or eroded lines of carved text. The humble newsprint is permeated with paint, as if with light. It might be a veil between one state of being and another: sometimes seemingly solid and at other times, easily penetrated — even by a breeze. Most especially, the fragile lengths of material suggest a fine thin fabric, a shroud, perhaps a winding sheet or mummy wrappings, all metaphors consistent with the idea of the Tenth Door. This is the door to the highest perception, the door to infinity, and, most important, release from the cycle of reincarnate life. However one interprets this multilayered symbol, Tenth Door is always the last door.

A striving for perfect attunement to the present characterizes the work of twentieth century Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock or his contemporary Helen Frankenthaler. Not surprisingly, these artists are associated with Zen Buddhism, a philosophy that advocates immersion in the present moment as a door to ultimate understanding. Frankenthaler (usually described as a post-painterly abstractionist) once told critic Barbara Rose that the kind of painting she wanted to make, “looks as if it were born in a minute.” Like Puri she is best known for poured, minimally manipulated paint.

Puri, who is himself a Buddhist, does not object to being linked to earlier abstractionists, but I suspect he sees such categories as red herrings. He shares Frankenthaler’s belief that, “Artists get into a state of working where there isn’t a lot of conscious mental control.”

For Puri, each series of paintings and each work within it grows from a specific broad metonymic category with a context of meaning.  The series title, “The Tenth Door,” names the highest of the yogic chakras (usually described as nodes of spiritual power located in the human body). Each chakra can be envisioned as a spinning wheel linked to a color and a sound. Each has a purpose and is necessary to mental and physical health, but the chakras are also hierarchical.

Most mystical spiritual traditions share a similar vision. Life energy or prana (Sanskrit) or qi (Chinese) or ashe (Yoruban) or ruah (Hebrew) flows along the chakras. The purpose of meditation is to raise energy from the lower levels, which are more concerned with the physical body to the highest one, the Tenth Door, which is purely spiritual. In Puri’s paintings, flowing color and repeated circular forms, both layered and opening, might be interpreted as energy rising through the chakras toward the Tenth Door.

In a slightly different context, The Tenth Door is also described as a complement to the nine bodily orifices. They are physical and visible; the Tenth Door is hidden, non-material and most fully accessible through discipline and meditation. This portal opens to a state of enlightenment and bliss, infinite and eternal.

Puri believes, “Even though you are in a world of duality of good and bad, black and white, you can step out of it. The thought of opposites is maya, illusion…. Each drop in the ocean may think it is a separate drop but that is an illusion.”

Puri’s goal: “I am hoping to create Oneness,” is ambitious but perfectly valid. Recognizing the constructed conventions of Western art, the inventors of abstract painting in the West felt that it could become a universal visual language.  We could take these paintings of Puri’s as a primer. Just as the spatial field in the paintings oscillates between foreground and background, our visual consciousness can move from the superficial to the sublime. By evoking the potential of the Tenth Door, Puri looks beyond daily events to the struggles that we experience when trying to understand ourselves and our place in the universe. The Tenth Door reminds us of the illusory nature of death and the timeless potential to experience the wholeness and the duality of existence.

www.antoniopuri.com