ARPANA CAUR: THE PASSION WITH TIME
‘What, then, is time? When nobody asks me, I know it. But when I try to explain it to someone, I don’t know it.’ This quotation from the father of Church Augustine is frequently mentioned when the phenomenon of time is discussed. Art has different access, explanations and presentations for it. In antique and medieval times, for instance, native narratives sequences of pictures are formed, sequences of scenes are collocated inn single picture, particularly in 14th and 15th century. Famous for this is Medici- cycle in Louvre Museum in Paris by Peter Paul Klee, Miro and Magritte did deal with the phenomenon of time many times; in particular surrealists like Dali, Max, Ernst and others up to Delveaux depicted different time layers as one single unit.
Arpana Caur affiliates to this prominent school of time explorers. ‘I’ m obsessed with the phenomenon of time, ‘she said once, and her pictures are witness to this obsession in many ways.
It seems we realize motifs in her paintings seemingly from classic art. Scissors are repeated symbol and remind us of the Fates, antique goddesses of destiny, who cut the thread of life when the time is due. The Norms, then, spin the thread, quite like many women toiling the distaff in Arpana’s pictures. Train- Tracks cross through mythical landscapes. Traffic lights are phase of order and timing. Everywhere you’ll find the river of time, form which powerful plants emerge or twisted dead trunks and branches submerge. A mediating yogi, oblivious of time and space, stands on one foot and ponders ascetically over spiritual eons.
However, Arpana wouldn’t come up as truly grand philosopher of painting when sufficing in such motifs, sets of classic s scenery. She pervades the phenomenon with quite a different intensity. Indian experience and conception of time differs from that of western world. There, time to karma and fate, which is renewed permanently and appears in varied complex forms; here: a teleological conception, time as a steady stream aiming at one goal. The idea of yuga, the Indian world era, encircles the chance to create time and recant it. In myth, fish-shaped grand Makhara belches time as lotus flower and retracts it. God Vishnu appears differently in each world – era to save it, to protect it from evil. But then he retires again to energizing slumber during in- between-the-eras, in a no-time.
Arpana’s picture haven’t elaborated ostensibly on this theme but cannot be received without. In her painting The Lady Swimmer form the cycle The Legend of Sohni the realistic swimmer is shown against a black background, in which she merge and which engulfs her like a parting matter. Black as experience of firmness and static is counterbalanced by the river of time, passing behind the dark surface of rippled waves. A light splits the flow of motion realistically and concrete a Stop of discipline. The picture of the mediating yogi lures the spectator from proper surrounding into a timeless space. Arjuna is shown in the great rock relief at Mahabalipuram immersed in timeless and so does the mediator here. Flowering trees surround him and enlighten everything a live in glowing colors. But beneath him: the black river, with floating branches, translucent, withered almost bodiless. The yogi is moved far from this world, no signs of sex, no emotions discernible on his almost transcendental face. He is kindred to figures of Buddha, which Arpana painted and drew in obsessive affection. Her figures recall sculptures from the Gupta-period: round, clear, full of spiritual power and bodily perfection. The enlightenment of Buddha, the thundering experience of Gautama Siddhartha in search of redemption, is portrayed by Arpana by contemporary means : like us drawing energy from the electric plug, the enlightenment of Buddha is experienced as plug-in. Energy spiritual power and the world of growth and organics determine the active men in the pictures of Arpana. The women she portrays are influenced by the artistic activities of her mother, Ajeet Caur, a prominent author who writes in Punjabi; there are set to their fate and the tissue of the world. They weave and spin, they divide with organizing scissors the streams of the time and narration, and they are norms, fates, goddesses of destiny at once.
The activity of her great paintings of females is not limited to religious- philosophical significance but extends always into social and political significance. For example, in one of her recent paintings a walking woman leaves the precinct of her home in order to march away into the open, into the green, into active life. Yet she startled as tradition impedes her daring steps. The situation of Indian women, ad women in general, becomes intelligible and clear by timeless presentation.
Arpana’s visual narrations from several decades formed a block: the concrete versus the abstract. Arpana has always insisted in telling about thoughts and actions in her paintings. She follows thus the tradition of sequences of tales as they presented in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, and also in the Punjab where she comes from. The way she tells stories is kindred to modern Indian- English literature as conceived by Salmaan Rushdie and Vikram Chandra. However, inside the Indian art circle and in the international world of painting Arpana represents an autonomous quality. She mixes different layers of time, linking them to differing methods of painting. Graphic elements are joined with illustrative and pictorial ones. Each of them aims at a different frame of presentation. Abstract and realistic merge without blending. Form and color gain importance. Smoothness and styling of the bodies lead to level of abstraction in the concrete, which we experience in similar way only in ancient Egyptian art. No wonder she shares the predilection for large eyes, ever mirrors of the soul.
Only few artists of the present India art scene have such an eminent influence and are present in all important art-centers of the world. Arpana’s paintings are to be found I England, Japan, Germany, the United States, and, Of course in India, in all major collections. Her positive, always active and soial oriented oeuvre obtains energy from immense pleasure In pictures and narrations bonded to time and space. Secular and spiritual aspects blend.
In Faust by J.W Goethe the protagonist conjures the spirit of earth: the latter, in describing himself defines almost the genius of Arpana: ‘ so I am producing on the dashing loom of time, thus creating God’s living raiment.’
Ernst W Koelnsperger, 2004
Translated by Dr Ernst e Fuchs
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