Reflect yourself on a speck of sunstruck
dust, on the point of a Iuminous pin, the centre of a revolving spoke,
the turning blades of a cycling fan. Everything going round and round,
with such great speed that all seems still, no movement at all. No agitated
movement, that is, but movement that calms the human eye. A blinding glow
at its heart, bewitch-ing, pulling, elevating by virtue of an intense secret
solar energy.
In the wheel and the circle is a completion
and union, the split halves of the opposites of the world here find per-fection,
wholeness. The psyche or spirit here become finalized, no longer fragmentary.
The chromosomes of the Mandala fall into a logical pattern, the cells arrange
them-selves into a foolproof, loopholeless order. A sudarshan chakra
of the yoked being whirls majestically.
It is towards such, the race's urge to meta-union,
that Biren De's vision gropes, and comes to sure grip.
The
unbroken, self-contained egg shape or the self-enclosing line lured the
primitive occultist, and it still does the modern. The mathematical harmony
and union of cults and esoteric symbols find an eloquent spokesman in Biren
De, but so in the idiom of our own times.
Biren De is not repeating his mantram mechanically
but in-fusing it with fresh form. Fresh, but still very much from its old
source. Only, he has cut it out step by step; the extra-neous, imitative
gesture and image are nowhere. There is a flash of flesh, which is new.
The banal men and women
have dropped away; with this dropping the
focus, the centre and the circumference, becomes clearer, and cleaner.
Every screw gets tightened up and the total begins to spin on its axis,
the hub. The shahti symbols, the conventional ones, are gradually replaced
by the single burning jewel in the lotus. Here then, is the wisdom of the
spirit; a third eye, the Shiva's, looking out like a searching ray in the
soul of man.
It is at this point he keeps arriving now.
No respite is allowed the viewer's vision to slip away in secondary revery,
in minor delights. What it does is to order self, to make it jump to attention.
A self-integration is what it causes in the beholder. An active listening
with eyes and ears, and with all the other senses sitting up. An attunement
to the mystery, the incandescent power that moves tides in the blood of
man and in the ocean waters and the suns of the worlds-this has been the
prayer and the quest.
In
one sense the composition is simple, a decorative pattern. A pattern often
come across in psychedelic design and in the disc. But one knows, that
even as one views an astro-nomer's plate on the shell-like turning galaxy
one is brought to book-to alarm and awe, to suspense. So also with Biren
De's work, work as symbol of the primal force, of the pulsation of seed
and atom and Star alike.
No concessions are made, in this self-centering,
this vertical take off. The wonder of the circle sets up its own resonance
in the mind; resonance which touches off a chain of vital reaction in turn,
of a blend of thought and meaning. A snatch of brief peeps on the visvarup,
the creative fire that pervades the small and large alike and in the soul
of man. No secondary social meanings here, no association or associations
such as bubble up from unconscious revery; only the primary and alert ones,
of being and becoming.
Here then is the in-sucking whirlpool of a
divine furnace. A glint from Mesmer's metal or diamond that sends one on
a trip, a trance; the full mind given over
to truth, the surrender to light.
Thus is the integration of personality effected
and that with no analyst's instructions. It is wordless, except for
the prayer wheel of a sound, a deep boom. It is integration, not
of the sick and the unwell but of the well and the normal; of the strong,
in need of uplift from the normal and the average, the sublimating of vital
powers, the heigh-tening of awareness, the opening of the doors of perception,
but only on the stuff of fundamental experience, not on its passing forms.
The work does not represent an escape, even
though it is not intended as expressing social concern. Its connection
is not with the given, the outward I, the autobiographical element, but
with the perennial human questions, of being, of self and non self, the
need to renewal, of solitude. It is the renovation of mind and will, by
detachment, an ex-pression of the praying spirit.
An
osmosis takes place as presumably it would take place given an initiation
with a seer, a clairvoyant. But here there is a concrete visionary directness,
and silence. What it all comes to is that art such as Biren De's has no
mere sensuous appeal, nor the religious one based on stereotyped ritual
or concept. Not nature but nature and self, the interaction of the
two goes to make it, and to raise it to the intellectual plane. It's is
an idea-ideal symbiosis. It is not contentless. But the content is
different. It belongs to a fresh genre, a genre now being pursued
by more than one artist. But Biren De has sought it for more than
a few years. One traces it right to his art's incipience.
Thus a continuity can be traced in his inspired
Blakean madness, and intensity. Also since the real test is in the exe-cution
one can see how authentic, un-shortcutish his labour is. It has a foundation
of Iayers of paint without, acrylics etc., etc. No slick touch here.
No wonder Biren is averse to the hard edge school of the west; he has no
ambitions to get rich quick-affectwise, no hurry therefore, nothing facile
in the use of colour, and the spectrum fans out full, with seemliness,
with authenticity; the catholicities of pristine nature itself. Biren
De is as articulate about his path, his pursuit in words as he is in actual
performance. He is quite clear in his head about sticking to the strait
and narrow and he has at his back the requisite old Indian patience; he
knows that what kills art is compromise; is never on the alert, always
turning inward towards the human image-a manner, which is quite a way from
the sensational pay offs of a considerable amount of contemporary art.
Meditation is what makes it itself. It
has no lighter touches, or 'humour'. This limitation may seem a big price
to pay but it is not. What is received is genuine solitude and the certainty
of human faith.
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