Artist Shridhar Iyer’s paintings initiate in-depth conversations about spiritual leanings, says Uma Nair

Tucked away in Hauz Khas village, Art Konsult has a series of abstract works by veteran artist Shridhar Iyer that is a lesson in the leanings and learnings of the abstract journey that unravels through time and tide. Over the years, Shridhar has projected himself as a pilgrim in search of the intangible. A silent vibration of a mantra emanates from his countenance and you think of discipline, simplicity and devout absorption that transcend the frontiers of experience to give us a moving moment.

His profile photographs on Facebook clearly unravel a quest for something that is not merely temporary but something that is ephemeral and indeed incandescent in its deeply tenured terrain. His paintings are Pollockian canvasses that are indeed not spectacularly beautiful but they are in-depth conversations about the spiritual leanings that are specifically cited within the compartments of his interior journey.

Floating tendrils

What meets the eye are lush-laced floating tendrils, which float toward and over each other but always in a swirl of grace, rising and falling through fields as if swirling down against an inky plane of deeper densities. The elegant tangerine and saffron shades create stunning contrasting islands of tonality, even as the looped lines meet at the stark dividing lines that separate different realms.

In the subsequent paintings, that continue this motif, the swirls shapeshift. They become ethereal, like curvilinear spirits that converge in flashing swirls, transforming again into streams of energy that rush through a colourful, charismatic world at once ordered yet uncannily infinite.

Transcendent journeys

Shridhar has over the years meditated upon his own poetically transcendent journeys characterising an inner spirit inspired by his own interactions on an inward journey of a higher plane. You can look at these abstractions and know immediately that Shridhar is an artist who delves and delineates his own intuitive journey.

Here are a series of embedded thoughts that are made of narrow strips of fragile and pliant strokes that lay stretched in quadruple layers of warps and wefts on the different layers of colour that appear and disappear, bringing up the lower levels to the top, sending it back down the brims of the canvas, bringing it up again in a different way so that it looks like the fiber lines are meshing, tangling, and organically growing together. Before he takes them out of tension, they are aligned to certain gravitational forces that are unseen but hold them together in a lock in embrace that tingles in its minimal moorings.

Ordered progression

Whether you look at the colour tones or the looped linearities or the tiny textural nuances, you think of an ordered progression in which the inner being celebrates primeval, primordial chaos that is at once dulcet, distinct and deeply gravitas filled. These works, in an ordered progression, illustrate the birth of an inner world that is at once elusive as well as elegant in the many meanderings that it explores in terms of dimensions. Shridhar explores the dichotomies — heaven and earth, male and female, positive and negative — that structure our existence. He, in a subtle and silent way, also unveils the symbolic lexicon of the mantras that we use when we chant Sanskrit prayers and this is what he has continued to develop throughout his career as an abstractionist. You can sense the realms and the rhythmic resonance that grows and flows. You can see  the ever-shifting primordial vignettes of experience that evolve in these works — rendered in crimson, amorphous blue, canary yellow, and moss green. We can think of the unity of colour tones as much as we think of zones of meditation that form in our inner meditative moments.

Spiral and swirl forms appear often — a potent symbol that Shridhar has been using again and again to suggest individual personal spiritual growth, progress, and evolution that resides within and without.

We can think of many things. Of the importance of the individual as a being held by the spirit of godliness within — held by use threads of conviction in an invisible realm of existence.

These works remind of the nirgun poetry of Kabir the mystic.

Among the various collections of Kabir’s poems, Bijak is considered the most authoritative by the members of Kabir Panth. The word, Bijak means a document by which a hidden treasure can be located. The compiler of the collection probably chose this word as a title for verses which were considered to reveal the hidden treasures of religious knowledge.

Ultimately, the abstractionist is one who conveys the spiritual world through his own paintings, and when these paintings are showcased in a space, it speaks like a temple that echoes the many mantras and prayers held within the folds of the works. This show is a must for students of the world of art in the capital city because it speaks at different levels about the why and wherefore of abstraction in a world that has been celebrating stray design and strokes of colour for abstraction when in reality, it belongs to the pedigree of experience and exploration over the years instead of the overnight bubble.