MY PERCEPTION

Art to me is a happening and performance, an instant plunging, flirting and merging, with life, with its being and becoming it. All that is there on the canvas is but a charge in celebration. Things, objects are only focal points of the here and now, in a whole that stretches infinitely, the feeling of unlimited envelops; something mystical in a sense. Like a dancer, who performs, not for herself, but for the spectator. The dancer is the spectator and the dance.

I paint, repaint and paint all over again, in order to be one with it – to be that. I paint the same way often. Like coming to a woman one loves, and is obsessed about. Is it the body alone that one comes to? Is not the person whole, and real, I am trying to be with? ---. I paint at a go, for hours and non-stop, reaching all over the surface. Nothing is empty, every bit of space breathes, I work with a restless speed, not to let my consciousness and routine self interfere. Let the act speak.

The word image is very central for Indian mystical thought. It transcends the very image it’s supposed to represent. The animals, trees, rivers, mountains, the entire objective world and earth itself are but images inhabiting a certain spirit; not seen as that particular object, and are thus due to our veneration and celebration. The objects are because of the “Karma” mystic: they are what they are in this life but are in transience. I grew in this atmosphere in India.

Almost from the beginning, as when I was a student in Bombay, and later as a painter, I became aware of everything in nature, moving innately, and rising towards its optimal expression. This phenomenon, issuing in a burst of bloom, which comprises the infi- -nite order of the cosmic whole, was an inspiration to me. It motivated my experiences and understanding of art. It touches us at all times and deepens entirely, and yet is beyond our deliberation and conscious knowledge. Our consciousness is merely of the superficial appearance, is a framework of our reflexes, which is without substance.

Most art, whether classical, academic or traditional – oriental, mythologized art – remains bound up to a dualistic notion, reducing it to a myth of subject and object. The real escapes us for it is seen as a flux, lacking in order. Further, we suppose that experience has the same defined finite limit and structure as things around us, with which we are concerned. For a great many artists, many of whom became world celebrities, the main preoccupation was to get past the surface reality, into “the Real”, pure and formless; that was the real concern. In the matrix of the “real”, the artist`s intentions plays no part, he is interfused with it. The early discoveries in nuclear science that the basic units of matter – the atom, for instance – were no more concrete than any other human construct; they too were myths. This realization made the matter mysterious, a further mind-shattering exercise, reminding us of the futility of the enterprise.

“Art steadily disengage(s) itself from nature”, said Kandinsky. For him, his own works were spiritual expressions of the cosmos. In his essay concerning “form” he writes; “The art today embodies the spiritual, matured to the point of revelation.” And for Paul Klee; “my hand is entirely the instrument of a more distant sphere; nor is it my head that functions in my work; it is something else.” Ultimately, for the modern spirit of art and the entire genre of contemporary art, there has been a great explosion, exploration, for newness, intrinsic and deeper – plunging into the realm of psyche and thought. Early in this century, there was a burst of freedom and intense activity. Impressionism, Fauvism, Surrealism, the Dada, Symbolism and Abstraction, signifi cantly transformed the world art scene – changing our outlook and conception of art entirely – breaking away from the rigid past, traditional and institutional.

The art and the artist thus undergo a unique soul-searching cultural experience. More and more, abstraction becomes a dominant trend everywhere all over the world. It was a torturous and slow process, and for many, who later were to be world celebrities, it was a thankless job. “Piet Mondrian accused Cubism of not having pursued Abstraction to its logical end.” “For the abstract expressionists later, art was just an event and the canvas an arena in which to act”. “It is not a picture of a thing, it is the thing itself.”

“ Art, detached and freed of all intentions and reflexes, is a manifestation of the creative will, seen from within as archetypal and from without as abstraction; but nevertheless, the same in spirit” – “It is not I who live, it lives me.”

AMBADAS
Oslo, Norway