Becoming into being: Sohan Qadri

Becoming into being: Sohan Qadri

by: Prabuddha Ghosh

"That is the geometry of verticality and horizontality, they're important in visual images: I'm a vertical because the spine is vertical, samsara is horizontal; if we become oblique it's psychedelic. That creates sensation not silence. Some of my paintings have the power to break down your sensational expectation because they don't offer you anything to stand on, they have the power to break down your chattering mind, then you fall into silence. That's what my paintings try to do, because in silence we are the same. The moment we talk, we start differing." ... About His conception and philosophy of works, Sohan Qadri once said.

Sohan Qadri merged nonfigurative painting with Eastern philosophy in his lush works on paper later on canvas. Qadri left India in 1965 to travel through Africa, Europe, and North America. He began painting colorful, abstract canvases while briefly living in Zurich. From the 1980s until his death. Qadri created Tantric paintings by carefully incising and altering large sheets of paper and covering the sheets with luxuriant hues, often using subtle variations of the same color. The rippled papers have an almost three-dimensional appearance, and, when coupled with the coloring, create rich optical effects that transcend formalism. Each work traces the artist’s mental state during its production; “When I start on a canvas, first I empty my mind of all images. I dissolve into all primordial space,” the artist once said.

Sohan Qadri, the artist, poet and vajrayan Tantric Yogi has travelled the world - from a village in India, to the mountains of Tibet, to the jungles of Africa, across Europe and America as a seeker. His is a modern and post-modern history that sweeps across continents and thus he said, "I did not confine myself to one place, nation or community." His approach to life and art has been universal. Qadri's origins are in rural India, and as a boy, he was initiated by a Sufi and a Vajrayana Tantric guru; this led to his lifelong practice of meditation and study of Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi philosophy and their crossroads, both of which inform his work. Hence some of his appreciator has rightly said, "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." Qadri found his first powerful patron in Dr Mulk Raj Anand in 1961. In the course of his career, he interacted with an astonishing array of cultural figures including the surrealist artist Rene Magritte and Heinrich Boll who became an important patron. Despite the fact that he lives in Denmark, an overriding sense of Eastern ethos pervades his art. F N Souza, the leader of the Progressive Group of artists of Bombay has said, "Qadri is characterised as a learned man and as a rare and original painter. You may look at his paintings as symbolic representations of the 'serpent power' (Kundalini) -- or as a mere form and color to enjoy as pure art." Thus he creates a total visual experience in an environment that is in essence formless, its essential nature infinite.

Sohan Qadri was born on 2nd November 1932 to a wealthy farming family as Sohan Singh, in the village of Chachoki in Punjab, near Kapurthala. At very early age, he came across two spiritualists living on the family farm –Bikham Giri and Ahmed Ali Shah Qadri association with them heralded a lifelong commitment to spirituality and art. During later stage he adopted the name of Qadri in place of Singh.He has interacted several times with Progressive Artists’ Group in Bombay. However, they rejected the reliance on figuration considered ‘authentically Indian’ and veered towards abstraction, with several of them eventually abandoning representation altogether in a search of transcendence or a new expression.

The dot among the dots who was Becoming into being has left for his ultimate destination on 2nd March 2011.