Payaluttam

Sohan Qadri is a yogi, poet and a painter from India who has lived in Copenhagen for the past 30 years. His paintings result from states of deep meditation, and are informed by the colors of India: luminous, dye-infused works on meticulously serrated paper. Over his long career, Qadri has interacted with a wide array of cultural figures including Surrealist painter René Magritte, Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll, and architect Le Corbusier. Böll once said, "Sohan Qadri with his painting liberates the word meditation from its fashionable taste and brings it back to its proper origin." He has had more than 70 exhibitions in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Quotations

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 reviwed 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

Selected Bibliography

1999 Sakshi, The Seer, Art & Deal, New Delhi,

1995 AntarJoti, Punjabi Sutras, Nav Yug, New Delhi, India

1995 Aforismer, Danish translation of English Sutras, Omens Forlang, Denmark

1990 Boond Samunder, Punjabi Sutras, Amritsar, New Delhi, India The Dot & the Dot’s, English Sutras, Writers Workshop, Calcutta, India

1987 Mitti Mitti, Punjabi sutras, Nava Yug, New Delhi, India

1978 The Dot & the Dot’s Poems & Paintings, Stockholm, Sweden