<p>It is not astonishing that many great Indian artists finally become saints,” wrote Francis Newton Souza (1924-2003), the well-known modernist painter of the country. “With Sohan Qadri it seems to me the reverse has occurred, but perhaps to revert again.” <br /><br /></p>.<p>One of the finest abstractionist painters of his time, Qadri is remembered for his large canvases and works on paper on which he created deeply felt forms as well as indescribable emptiness as alternate forces of life. “When I start on a canvas, first I empty my mind of all images. They dissolve into all primordial spaces. Only emptiness, I feel, should communicate with the emptiness of the canvas. Yes, I start from emptiness, and then the two emptinesses (mine and that of the canvas) communicate. Emptiness and fullness cannot communicate because they conflict; out of conflict only conflict can come, not harmony. You can’t get an elephant child from a camel.”<br /><br />Qadri thus related his art to accepting (and perhaps celebrating) the aspect of darkness and emptiness. “I am a dot of darkness in a dark space,” he says in the short but evocative video produced by Sundaram Tagore Gallery. He believed that “darkness is where peace is; it is synonymous with silence.” Going further, he would explain: “Our universe is 99 per cent dark; space is dark; we have very little light. We are replicas of our universe; we are dark inside. I call this the darkness of recognition.”<br /><br />Colour and abstraction<br /><br />Born in rural Punjab in 1932 to a Hindu mother and Sikh father, Sohan Qadri (real name Sohan Singh Barhing), was initiated into Sufi and Tantric traditions as a young boy. In his teens, he supposedly ran away from home and spent time at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery and remote temples in the Himalayas and Tibet. All these initiations and experiences had a bearing on his later life and art. <br /><br />Qadri’s artistic talents were first recognised by the eminent Indo-English writer, Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004), who set up his first exhibition in Le Corbusier’s brand new architectural complex in Chandigarh. Soon after, Qadri left India and travelled to Nairobi in 1933. Later on, he journeyed across France and other countries, coming in contact with some of the most celebrated artists of the time. He finally settled in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he was among several artists and counter-culture figures, who illegally took over a disused gun factory to establish a famous free city, Christianna. The last three decades of his life were spent in Copenhagen, but when he breathed his last on March 2, 2011, he was in Toronto, Canada. <br /><br />Spiritually inspired<br /><br />Having spent a significant part of life abroad, Qadri developed an abiding interest in Western Minimalism. While minimalistic expression became a distinctive feature of his art, he remained faithful to a lifelong engagement with spiritually-inspired abstract forms with an intrinsically Indian colour palette of sindoori reds, Kancheepuram peacock blues, intense oranges, not to forget the heavy blacks and greys. <br /><br />“I came to abstraction right from the beginning; by conviction and not by experimenting, not by fooling around until I found something. It was already found, discovered.” As for the resplendent colours dominating his art, he had a simple explanation: “I don’t intervene with colours, I don’t fight with them, or dissipate them to suit my thought process. I take them as pure as they come. I don’t let my thought into it. For me, colour must stand clearly on its own, in its own intensity.”<br /><br />Qadri’s art was well-recognised in the West; he had more than 50 exhibitions in the US, Europe, Asia and Africa. Among his admirers were Germany’s foremost post-World War II writer and Nobel laureate Heinrich Theodor Böll (1917-1985) and the renowned American art critic and art historian Donald Kuspit (b. 1935). “Sohan Qadri with his painting liberates the word meditation from its fashionable taste,” wrote Böll. “He brings it back to its proper origin, uninfluenced by western propaganda, misunderstandings and corruption.” <br /><br />According to Kuspit, Qadri occupied a unique position in the history of late twentieth-century art. “He was a modernist who developed an uncompromising non-objective visual language, while drawing inspiration from his age-old Indian roots as an initiated tantric. A master of minimalism, he created luminous, vibrantly coloured paintings that combine formal brilliance with spiritual content intended to awaken in the viewer something beyond the aesthetic — beyond even the senses. Qadri’s forms bring an unexpected new dimension to the discourse on Western Minimalism. Using abstraction to convey transcendence, he is the pre-eminent aesthetic mystic of modernism.” <br /><br />Tears, marks & poetry<br /><br />While minimalistic forms and vibrant colours seemed to be Qadri’s leitmotifs, there was another unique feature that marked many of his paintings. In them, the artist serrated and perforated heavy sheets of paper to develop a sculptural quality, energy and rhythm to the work. Qadri used vivid pigments and the ink-and-dye technique to great effect. <br /><br />American Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman described Qadri’s dots and striations as “lustrous bubbles of energy”. Another observer remarked, “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. In the hands of Qadri, the very nature of paper is transformed into a three-dimensional medium.” <br /><br />Qadri was also an established poet. He wrote in a classical Punjabi idiom and published several collections of poems. His poetry in translation was published as The Dot & the Dots, Poems & Paintings, Stockholm (1978); Aforismer, Danish translation of English Sutras, Oslashmens Forlag Copenhagen (1995) and The Seer, Art Konsult, New Delhi (1999).<br /><br />In the end, Qadri’s personality seems to have been aptly described by F N Souza. “He is a saintly man from whom an aura emanates,” he wrote way back in 1976. “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.”</p>
<p>It is not astonishing that many great Indian artists finally become saints,” wrote Francis Newton Souza (1924-2003), the well-known modernist painter of the country. “With Sohan Qadri it seems to me the reverse has occurred, but perhaps to revert again.” <br /><br /></p>.<p>One of the finest abstractionist painters of his time, Qadri is remembered for his large canvases and works on paper on which he created deeply felt forms as well as indescribable emptiness as alternate forces of life. “When I start on a canvas, first I empty my mind of all images. They dissolve into all primordial spaces. Only emptiness, I feel, should communicate with the emptiness of the canvas. Yes, I start from emptiness, and then the two emptinesses (mine and that of the canvas) communicate. Emptiness and fullness cannot communicate because they conflict; out of conflict only conflict can come, not harmony. You can’t get an elephant child from a camel.”<br /><br />Qadri thus related his art to accepting (and perhaps celebrating) the aspect of darkness and emptiness. “I am a dot of darkness in a dark space,” he says in the short but evocative video produced by Sundaram Tagore Gallery. He believed that “darkness is where peace is; it is synonymous with silence.” Going further, he would explain: “Our universe is 99 per cent dark; space is dark; we have very little light. We are replicas of our universe; we are dark inside. I call this the darkness of recognition.”<br /><br />Colour and abstraction<br /><br />Born in rural Punjab in 1932 to a Hindu mother and Sikh father, Sohan Qadri (real name Sohan Singh Barhing), was initiated into Sufi and Tantric traditions as a young boy. In his teens, he supposedly ran away from home and spent time at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery and remote temples in the Himalayas and Tibet. All these initiations and experiences had a bearing on his later life and art. <br /><br />Qadri’s artistic talents were first recognised by the eminent Indo-English writer, Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004), who set up his first exhibition in Le Corbusier’s brand new architectural complex in Chandigarh. Soon after, Qadri left India and travelled to Nairobi in 1933. Later on, he journeyed across France and other countries, coming in contact with some of the most celebrated artists of the time. He finally settled in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he was among several artists and counter-culture figures, who illegally took over a disused gun factory to establish a famous free city, Christianna. The last three decades of his life were spent in Copenhagen, but when he breathed his last on March 2, 2011, he was in Toronto, Canada. <br /><br />Spiritually inspired<br /><br />Having spent a significant part of life abroad, Qadri developed an abiding interest in Western Minimalism. While minimalistic expression became a distinctive feature of his art, he remained faithful to a lifelong engagement with spiritually-inspired abstract forms with an intrinsically Indian colour palette of sindoori reds, Kancheepuram peacock blues, intense oranges, not to forget the heavy blacks and greys. <br /><br />“I came to abstraction right from the beginning; by conviction and not by experimenting, not by fooling around until I found something. It was already found, discovered.” As for the resplendent colours dominating his art, he had a simple explanation: “I don’t intervene with colours, I don’t fight with them, or dissipate them to suit my thought process. I take them as pure as they come. I don’t let my thought into it. For me, colour must stand clearly on its own, in its own intensity.”<br /><br />Qadri’s art was well-recognised in the West; he had more than 50 exhibitions in the US, Europe, Asia and Africa. Among his admirers were Germany’s foremost post-World War II writer and Nobel laureate Heinrich Theodor Böll (1917-1985) and the renowned American art critic and art historian Donald Kuspit (b. 1935). “Sohan Qadri with his painting liberates the word meditation from its fashionable taste,” wrote Böll. “He brings it back to its proper origin, uninfluenced by western propaganda, misunderstandings and corruption.” <br /><br />According to Kuspit, Qadri occupied a unique position in the history of late twentieth-century art. “He was a modernist who developed an uncompromising non-objective visual language, while drawing inspiration from his age-old Indian roots as an initiated tantric. A master of minimalism, he created luminous, vibrantly coloured paintings that combine formal brilliance with spiritual content intended to awaken in the viewer something beyond the aesthetic — beyond even the senses. Qadri’s forms bring an unexpected new dimension to the discourse on Western Minimalism. Using abstraction to convey transcendence, he is the pre-eminent aesthetic mystic of modernism.” <br /><br />Tears, marks & poetry<br /><br />While minimalistic forms and vibrant colours seemed to be Qadri’s leitmotifs, there was another unique feature that marked many of his paintings. In them, the artist serrated and perforated heavy sheets of paper to develop a sculptural quality, energy and rhythm to the work. Qadri used vivid pigments and the ink-and-dye technique to great effect. <br /><br />American Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman described Qadri’s dots and striations as “lustrous bubbles of energy”. Another observer remarked, “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. In the hands of Qadri, the very nature of paper is transformed into a three-dimensional medium.” <br /><br />Qadri was also an established poet. He wrote in a classical Punjabi idiom and published several collections of poems. His poetry in translation was published as The Dot & the Dots, Poems & Paintings, Stockholm (1978); Aforismer, Danish translation of English Sutras, Oslashmens Forlag Copenhagen (1995) and The Seer, Art Konsult, New Delhi (1999).<br /><br />In the end, Qadri’s personality seems to have been aptly described by F N Souza. “He is a saintly man from whom an aura emanates,” he wrote way back in 1976. “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.”</p>
