SATORI LINES
A rare collection of artworks by the late abstractionist Nasreen Mohamedi reveals her philosophical outlook and love for minimalism
Spring in Delhi is the season of art. Galleries in the capital don the evening wear of high art, and the annual art fair is an efflorescence of creativity, leaping out of the booths in a mating dance of canvases and installations. Art parties acquire the aura of pilgrimages, and the delirium is unshakeable—even by an earthquake.
And yet, in the middle of it, in the designer stores-lined service lane of the upmarket Defence Colony in South Delhi, there is an art show that is a counterpoint to all this, replete with Yin energy, like a nun in a meditative retreat. The artworks are on small sheets of paper, mostly with just pen and pencil lines—so delicate, like ‘glass placed in water’, that they can’t be photographed by phone cameras. To see them, you need to come close, immerse yourself.
As you get in the range and the eye begins to discern the delicate line forms, you enter the artwork with a gasp and discover the brilliance of Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990), one of the pioneers of modern art in India and one of the first artists to use the vocabulary of modern abstraction in post-Independence India. The show brings together, for the first time, a collection of 40 artworks by this reclusive artist—paintings, drawings and photographs— from the collection of the Glenbarra Art Museum of Japan.
The deliberate and precise lines in the drawings, floating on the white of the paper with subtle shifts in intensity and texture, create seismograph-like patterns that evoke tremulous epiphanies. Like vibrations that are more perceptible than comprehensible. The works have the effect of Zen Koans, questions that defy answers. Art critic Keshav Malik described it as “a musical score for inner ears”. In several works, the rhythmic flow of lines is
deftly paused to create shape gaps around void space. In these breathtaking absences, the geometry comes alive, acquiring philosophical dimensions alluding to Zen, Sufi and Daoist influences on the artist’s thought. In the tight meter of the repetitive parallel lines, Mohamedi introduces subtle anomalies of angle to create ripples of asymmetry in the otherwise austere and mathematical patterns. In places, she creates illusions of curves by joining straight lines in angled precision. It is still abstract geometry, but imbued with movement and play. In some works, the pressure on the pen’s tip is shifted to bring subtle tonal gradations in the same line, creating forms that appear to be submerged in water or coalescing out of nothingness. The surge of feelings they evoke rouses us like the wordless alaap of a raga. We are left in a pulsating void of heightened awareness—a ‘satori’ moment.
The show also has several of Mohamedi’s photographs—mostly abstract compositions of road markings and architectural forms—which displayed along with the artworks induce an anomalous reading of them as representational sources of her geometric language. However, seen independently, they divulge a seeing process that strips the photographed subjects of all identity and symbolism and reduces them to detached geometry. Mohamedi appears using the camera viewfinder as a training device, for the eye to silence its seeing. As such, these photographs are vital clues for understanding the artist’s practice, which is to cleanse the lines of all allusions, all sediments of meanings and free them from even a shadow of the self. ■
(Works by Nasreen Mohamedi from the collection of Glenbarra Art Museum, Japan, are on display in Delhi at the Vadehra Art Gallery till March 2 and at Bikaner House from March 10 to April 4, and in Mumbai at the Pundole Art Gallery from April 20 to May 26)
The works of Nasreen Mohamedi have the effect of Zen Koans, evoking questions that defy answers