God is the Geometer
When you look at the world around you, what do you see? Do you ignore the chaos or do you engage with it?
I live in Goa and it’s really easy to see wonder in every footstep, every car ride or cycling down the village roads. When I’m in Delhi, it’s still in the natural world that I find that same sense of awe and see a reflection of my own nature. I can’t quite feel the same about the high rises, chaotic traffic snarls, road rage, lack of civic sense, persistent honking and beggars knocking at the car window. The crush of city life, brings forth another kind of experience. One that pushes out thoughts and feelings I may not be as willing to acknowledge when the pace is slower and less threatening.
However, last evening, I walked into Gallery Espace to see the work of Ashok Ahuja and had to marvel at how he was able to find order in this kind of chaos - find himself in a pristine space beyond the cacophony of crowded spaces and conversations of the figurative dimensions of the physical world.
The artist had printed “God is the geometer” on one of the gallery walls. Pertaining to the belief that a god created the universe according to a geometric plan. The idea is attributed to Plato who said “Convivialium disputationum, liber “ meaning God geometrizes continually" Mathematics has been linked to cosmology and geometric forms are continually found in nature and the architecture of temples. If God is the geometer who creates our illusion of the world with mathematical precision of various permutations and combinations of light versus dark, then Ahuja becomes the geometer of his own world view.
Geometric forms, lines, shade and light form the very basis of his cosmology. He walks through cities of the world seeking light. He finds light in everything he sees. And then, he manipulates what he sees - his viewed reality, to find a window into the complex construct of his own mind. Chatting with him about his thought process and his philosophy, was fascinating. It’s not often that one meets an artist who can find clarity in the urban chaos of over-populated, badly planned Indian cities.
Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist had said that design arises from amidst the chaos of form. Ahuja demonstrates this with a masterful stroke in his solo show entitled ‘Matrix at Seventy-three Square’. I’m no mathematician, quite the contrary, my accounting has inherent flaws and none trust my calculations. So don’t let the title intimidate you. The visuals are far more evocative and you don’t need to have a degree in physics and mathematics to appreciate the way he distorts form to create a whole new way of looking. In fact, his art works cause you to pause and reflect on life beyond what you think you see.
‘Open Drawing Lesson’ is a set of multiple visuals where Ashok evokes the “dynamic, ever-responsive, ever-changing universe” loading its brush with light “to draw simple, wondrous forms as reflections on the windows of the mind fixed in the walls of everyday reality streaming in open streets, reflecting beauty and truth” becoming a lesson in art and life. The images are abstracted visions of light that could be mistaken for ripples of water. The reflections are manipulated, distorted, diminished or expanded in an exploration that goes beyond the forms manifested by sacred geometry. He’s not really interested in recounting the physical aspects of life, the figures and forms. He is attempting to transcend them, go beyond form to another reality seen only by the minds eye. Ordering his universe in symmetrical windows despite the varied images they display.
His medium of exploration and expression is digital which lends itself well to the idea of ‘bending light’. They’re presented to us ‘archival pigment ink on canvas. A concrete vision of a nebulous, transient inner journey of engaging through the manifest world with the intangible self.
In ‘Navajivan Nagar’ he finds stacks of books printed by the Navjivan Trust, founded by Mahatma Gandhi, in their basement. They remind him of high rises so he removes the musty basement walls, replacing them with a pale cobalt blue aether with floating white cumulus in the background, to create the illusion of a cityscape. As if to say that it’s our knowledge, our study of the universe through centuries of contemplation on this mysterious creation that can take us beyond the weightiness of the cityscape into the lightness of being.
“House of Cards” was a telling commentary on the fragility of our colossal pillars of steel with tinted glass facades. For try as we might, we cannot hide forever behind these towers and escape the veritable museum of our minds. The ever-growing archive of memory that reassures as much as it haunts. And unless we examine it as we do the art works in a museum, reflecting and relating to our humaneness it may well bring us crashing down, without the much needed humility of knowing ourselves. The tall building buckles, as we do at the knees, in discovering our inadequacies, ineptness, and dysfunctional patterns of behaviours. Humbled in our own eyes, the building doesn’t fall, shattering to the ground. It kneels as if in prayer.
Inside & Out - Museum of the Mind is a large body of work spanning eight years in contemplating and executing. Ahuja creates the illusion of brick walls with a large square window embedded in each. And each window is a glimpse of how he manipulated mortar and steel into deep reflections on existence itself. It’s as if these concrete structures dissolve in his mind. There is a dynamism in this dissolution that is never complete, but it’s suggested that he can take himself and us into that non-figurative, abstract, energetic field through this study of the museum of the mind. Leaning on its creative potential, it’s imagined archives of being.
Given the growing chaos of being. The emerging idea that living life to the fullest is about rushing around the world, where our constructs can come crashing down. Ashok Ahuja gently suggests you pause and examine this precarious house of cards and delve deeper into how much more powerful you could be as the geometer of your own existence, if you began exploring the museum of your mind.
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