Sohan Qadri - Quotations

Quotations

It is a privilege to introduce the wisdom and art of Sohan Qadri, even in such a small way as this. Such art does not aim to produce theory. It may not even aim for anything. It invites its participant by opening up the vibrant dimension where it arises. It flourishes within the field of the artist’s experience of reality. He breaks through to pure beauty by seeing through illusion and soaring free. Real freedom does not trap itself, it is simultaneously free from itself and so engages with the illusion out of joy and love for others still unfree. Deceiving illusion is transformed into liberating magic. Wisdom releases the artist into bliss. Bliss spontaneously looks with love on others, willing forth their bliss. The artist envisions a space of beauty where her experience can touch the other’s imagination.

-Dr. Robert Thurman

There are artists. There are tantrik artists. As far as I know, there are no tantrik yogis who are artists as well. Sohan Qadri is an exception. He is an exceptional artist. He is an accomplished master (guru) in the art of yoga. He is an accomplished master in the art of painting. He is a practicing tantrik yogi, who time to time performs the rituals (panch-makra) of eating taboo foods, drinking wine and indulging in ritual fornication. By breaking the law, in this case, he becomes the legislator.

To be an iconoclast, one must know how to build images. To break the law, one must be a learned lawyer.

Qadri is a learned man. He is a saintly man from whom an aura emanates. Try and expose him as a phoney saint and he emerges as a great artist. Try to 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.

There is no doubt in my mind that Sohan Qadri emerges as a rare and original partner. You may look at his paintings as yantras or mandalas and describe them with words that are mantras. You may look at his paintings as symbolic representations of Kundalini, the ‘serpent-power’ or Shakti, said to be coiled in the rear end of the spinal column. You may look at his paintings as mere form and color and enjoy them as pure art. No matter what angle you choose to look from, it reveals one great aspect—that of mysticism. In its aesthetics, the copulation of mater with the spirit is brought to a climax.

Sohan Qadri may be a guru. He may be a tantrik sage. He may be anything extraneous to art. To me he is an artist par excellence. Ajit Mookerjee’s Tantra Art (which I reviewed in Studio International, December 1996) states, “It is not astonishing that many great Indian artists finally become saints.” With Sohan Qadri, it seems to me, the reverse has occurred—but perhaps to revert again.

-F.N. Souza (Painter and Writer), New York, June 1976

The entire task of Qadri’s art is to achieve this aesthetic concretization of the doctrine of Sunyata. Whether his icons emphasize the void, as in the brooding darkness of Nayana and Ankura as well as the luminous emptiness, rimmed with darkness, of Sunyata IV, or the seed, as the erotically alive colors of Seed, Asha, and Dharma I suggest, they are tense with the dialectic of void and seed—the dialectic of creativity

-Donald Kuspit

Using abstraction to convey transcendence, he is the pre-eminent aesthetic mystic of modernism.

-Donald Kuspit