Beyond thinking

Sohan Qadri's current oeuvre has a meditative quality.

"The sheer intensity of colours in Sohan Qadri's paintings drums up a visual shock, resulting in an impact so strong that the thinking cap is sent for a toss. Just as Qadri intends it. "Some paintings make you think," he says, "some stop you thinking." Adding, "Thoughts would pollute my works."

The tonal quality is almost reverential "" doctors might even suggest they're therapeutic.

"Colour energy for me is potent," says the artist, who is also a tantric yogi, at least in the resonances of his work. There's an intensity and an energy in the layering of each colour, graded into a hundred shades. Almost. The trick in it lies in the technique he has developed and mastered - the art of dispersion.

Making spaced incisions on paper in tune with his philosophy of tantric art "" the mandala (its pictorial principle is represented within the symmetry of a constant spheroid) "" Qadri first douches the paper.

He next makes his own colours using inks and dyes, taking merely a drop or two of it on a brush. The sweep of Qadri's brush across the incisions and holes decides the colour and form the dispersing paint will take "" a faint sweep for lighter tones; slow and pressurised ones for darker tones.

The carefully calculated dispersion develops the painting's different shades in the next 14 hours till they dry. The dispersed patterns emerge on the obverse of the paper too. "I initiate the painting," says Qadri, "then it paints by itself".

Qadri's experimentation peaked when he tired of oil as a medium on canvas, even if it gave him 35 successful years as a painter. He wanted an easier medium where "I did not have to fight it, like with oils and the canvas", he says.

So he switched from canvas to paper and watercolours "" "paper being feminine and malleable as opposed to canvas that is masculine", explains Qadri, adding that his current technique of incisions on paper with inks "behaves as I tame them".

F N Souza once described Qadri as a learned man. "Try to expose him as a phony saint and he emerges as a great artist, try to put down his art as a gimmick and he comes across as a profoundly learned man," said Souza.

The precise symmetry of his abstracts hint at an esoteric cosmic energy. The lines of incision tend to morph into sound waves, colour proving to be its resonance.

The tiny holes are pricked according to the philosophy of mooldharni or in tune with the energy vibrations that surround us "" the lotus shape in his works symbolic of the chakras of the human body and the universe.

A concentrated gaze at Qadri's works evokes the resonance of energy or "shakti" in the madness of his dispersed, but symmetric, forms.

When he switched to paper, Qadri worked with two primary colours, but even that's been shorn off to just the one "energy" quadrant.

"Nature is symmetrical, it's the human mind that is chaotic," Qadri insists repeatedly. Look, he says again, but don't think. Exactly the mantra the ancient sages might have devised.