Stillness amidst soaring waves- Uma Nair,THE HINDU

Canvasses that look more like watercolours, and watercolours that look as if the wind has washed the waves across the shore, Satish Gupta’s “Roaring Sea, Still Mind” is more like a lesson in the art of meditative moorings in the life of an artist who is painter, poet, sculptor and design guru.

The Visual Arts Gallery is morphed into a Zen studio with paintings and sculptures and installations that make art aficionados gasp at the scale and gravitas of the artist’s imagination. “Roaring Sea, Still Mind” consists of three paintings that celebrate earth songs – they mirror the sensibility of an artist who travels across four winds and seven seas to nurture his love for the emancipation of the human spirit.

“I was at a peace conference in Normandy, France where I exhibited some scrolls with my haikus and brush calligraphy,” states Satish. “There was a gap of a few hours between speakers when my colleague Richard drove us to paint a canvas at the nearby beach which was the famous spot where Claude Monet and Eugene Delacroix created their masterpieces. On our way, the weather suddenly turned cloudy and by the time we arrived at the beach there was a big storm. The sea was rough and roaring with fury… I started sketching rapidly to capture the moment and clung to my notebook, preventing it from being blown away along with me. Absorbed in my drawing I was scanning the seascape when I noticed Richard who had walked down to the beach and was sitting there cross legged and deeply absorbed in meditation oblivious of the danger the environment posed.”

Satish captures Richard in the Zen moment. Suddenly in the three works you sense the stillness. Satish presents the contrast between the stormy sea and his calm, silent presence in the face of nature’s onslaught struck me deeply and inspired some of these works. I am drawn to Zen aesthetic, because of its simplicity, the play of emptiness and fullness, the asymmetrical forms and voids but above all the silence — the tranquillity. The stormy sea, the roaring waves became a metaphor for the chaotic state of our world today where we are governed by insensitive people who are drunk on power and indifferent to the rapidly deteriorating environment, to climate change.

Surreal sculptures

In one of the best works, “One note of Zen”, Satish uses the verse, “If the mind is clear like the August moon, there is no difference between an oasis and a mirage.” This is precisely what he does when he creates a set of sculptures that have a surreal signature. Amongst these are a set of wings, a tree called the Conference of Birds, and a Cosmic Wave that brings forward the power and panache of the tsunami like wave in sculptural terms with evanescence and elegance.

The wings in gold as well as a painted copper have an untrammelled energy that speaks of poise and poignancy. It’s as we are looking at an eagle’s wing that has a frozen pulse and a heart of fire. This sculptured wing brings forward the tales of yesterday and today and tomorrow. Too much sculpture, in today’s age, has seemed to embody an almost studiedly monumental lifelessness, and especially much of the sculptures which is commissioned to go on public displays.

“I wanted to create wings that speak of sculpture’s potential to represent three-dimensional form in different representations of symbolism,” affirms Satish who has always been fascinated by flight. Icarus is a story I have always pondered about.”

Satish’s wings seem more sculpturally alive and alight – even as each has its own narrative in the story of birds and eternity and all that is in part, that is to do with their poise and her perfection in the spirit of being.

“Conference of Birds” is a tree with birds, two peacocks in the foreground that burst in upon us without invitation, with a presence of all that is specific in nature and in reality. We notice that in casting in metal, Satish seeks to attain a formal perfection, in part at least, to smoothen the language of both casting as well as moulding to create a symphony that creates lyrical cadences of the beauty and dignity of life .

The cynosure of all eyes at the Visual Arts gallery, will be Satish’s veiled magnificent “Cosmic Wave”. Created as an amalgam of a fragment, not a whole the wave is both a fragment of itself, and a fragment of a larger scheme of things. “On a flight from London to Delhi, I thought of this great wave,” reminisces Satish. “Does the wave before dissolving on the shore question its destiny, was a question I kept asking myself. The greatest wave builds itself up and comes and dissolves in its own energy and spirit. We all leave our footprints behind – traces of our existence. Unlike other living beings, why does man need to immortalise them, build pyramids, build Taj Mahals? We are very conscious and aware of our footprints, which in a sense are our symbols, our search for immortality. We are afraid to die – why, when life is just one flowing river merging with the timeless ocean? ”

Emptiness in space

It’s the detailing of the wave that lends an incandescent aura of incantations – almost like a crystalline canticle that peals out the notes of different tenors and sopranos the curves and contours chisel our thoughts into a form that may as well just be a punctuation of moods in a myriad sky.

“Like the stone carvers of Ellora’s Kailashnath temple who created the masterpiece out of a single mammoth rock by chiselling away all that was superfluous, all that was not the temple, I create an emptiness in space by meditating on what I conceive as the spirit of the sculpture,” sums up Satish.

(“Roaring Sea, Still Mind” is on at Visual Art Gallery, India Habitat Centre, till 3rd February)