These beguilingly simple paintings—attenuated visions of Shiva's life-besotted penis—float in a realm not of abstraction or representation, but of devotion and meditation. Painted by anonymous worshippers of the Hindu deity, they share one basic element: a vertical ellipse centered on a simple ground of found paper. Created during the past four decades, the 71 small pieces gathered here play endless variations on the "linga" composition (which can be traced back 4,500 years), presenting the oval in flat color or adulterated by watery splatters or interspersed blots. The contrasts can be strong-—black solids surrounded by dissipating orange or yellow halos; white bisected by a purple spine of drips—but they are softened by the fields of stained brown and gray paper (even in weathered decrepitude, paper is a prized commodity in India's poorer regions). Some of these repurposed pages reveal lines of handwriting bleeding through from the versos; others are fringed with ragged, decoratively patterned borders. There's a mysterious aura to this sampling, culled from the much larger collection of a reticent Indian scholar who, when asked if he wished to be identified in the catalog, never replied. (In fact, it was a number of years before he would allow the works to be exhibited on this side of the world at all.) The frieze of simple, repeated shapes that girds the gallery emanates an atmospheric density, the myriad textures and hues inducing a contemplation markedly different from that which we might bring to the science-based abstractions of Terry Winters (whose weighty, organic gouaches are called to mind). Even an atheistic Western lunkhead can feel an intention here beyond voluptuous surface beauty, can sense aesthetics trumped by a search for some primordial form—for the egg of the universe.
Christopher Burke Studio
Members of Hinduism: Shiva Linga, anonymous, 1999
Details
'Shiva Linga Paintings'
Feature Inc.
530 West 25th Street
Through October 27
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