Today one of the most important shows in the history of Indian abstraction opens in Chicago. Deepak Tandon’s One Rock manages to break a frontier and reach a space where Indian abstraction has not gone before. Over the years Deepak Tandon has been developing a language that seeks to embody the Vedantic/Tantric concept linking Oneness and Shunya…exploring its links with harmony, eternity and wholeness. Yet, Tandon has persistently refused to ‘fall’ into the formally stagnated neo-tantric school of abstraction. After years of inventing and re inventing, with this body of works, one sees Tandon offering a language that breaks the formal stagnancy of the neo-tantric school, yet retaining its conceptual depth and philosophical anchoring.
What is the language of silence and purity? Can these two concept metaphors be understood/expressed in visuals created and seen in the contemporary world? How does one express in a visual language and yet keep the magic of silence and purity intact? These questions form the very basis of the metaphysical / artistic journey Deepak Tandon embarked upon as he began to weave together this body of untitled digitally manipulated photographic prints, and videos that form the body of One rock. Right from the very beginning, Tandon’s journey has been about understanding nature, understanding life and living through nature and having art as the medium through which the understanding is practiced and expressed. It’s been a long journey, a beautiful journey…yet bringing him to a point wherein he needed to re understand language, form and expression for his art to be able to dance in tandem with his soul.
Finally, with One Rock Tandon arrives These works are a major step forward in the history of abstract art in India, managing to break away from the Euro American understanding of abstraction. This show marks a significant departure from the motif based meeting ground of art, metaphysics and re citation of tradition. Abstraction till now as a major practice has not been able to go beyond the referential image. It is the abstraction of referential images (landscapes, dream spaces, Mandalas) that have marked the major body of abstract art that has emerged from India. The circle, the triangle, the square all these symbol metaphors Vedantic/tantric cosmology have gone on to define some of the most acclaimed contemporary abstract practice. Tandon manages to open up direction of the representation of the cosmic eternity my focusing on the experience of art making and seeing, rather than on the domains of meanings and definitions.
There are only two works that the artist chooses to title. Here, the purpose of the titles is not to fixate meaning, but rather to open up multiple interpretations, using tangents to tug our minds into the core of multiplicity that is central to the abstract imagination for Tandon. A silent mirrored and looped video is titled watERwHole , semantically opening up possibilities of reading/understanding the work in its first literal sense as water being the key merger, thus symbolizing the ‘whole’, or reading it as ER wHOLE referring to the female as an embodiment of completion and birth, or even at a more commonsensical level of the water hole being the center of life in a desert. Another video is titled shuddh I hinting towards the process of shuddhi (purification). However when one sees the pristine rock layered with fresh mountain water and the pure gurgling sound, it seems that the work is announcing shuddh I = "I am pure".
For the artist the practice of making and viewing abstraction has been a long journey in search of the potential to art to take us beyond the cultural materiality. Tandon is not just a child of Indian philosophic thought, he is also a child of post colonial India, its journey to reimaging the world, define for itself a notion of progress, growth and happiness. As an individual who is deeply invested in society, metaphysical imagination for the artist has been important in being able to imagine the world and society outside the colonial commonsense. To be able to break away from the language + commonsense nexus, over the years Deepak Tandon has been developing a language that seeks to embody this Vedantic concept of Oneness and eternity.
The contestation over the semantic and philosophical implication of the infinite is crucial to opening up new horizons of understanding life, existence, development and history. This is important as a window that helps us imagine the world outside a linear idea of progress and development. Deepak Tandon’s work begins to take special cultural value in the realms of imaginations outside neo liberalism, and gives us entry into an alternative globalised aesthetics, giving us approaches to Humanism from a framework which is outside Euro American modernism. The quietness that One Rock creates implodes the meaning of an image. In a spell of wisdom, it gives the power of the image to generate moments, which challenges the basic tenets of human behavior, succeeding to replace desire with love, confusion with tranquility and lust with union. It is this coming together of eternity as ‘oneness’ that forms the basis of One Rock..
