Zentranced!

Painter, sculptor, poet, writer, printmaker, muralist and designer, veteran artist Satish Gupta has adorned many hats in his career spanning over 40 years. After nine long years, he is back with his solo exhibition in the capital. Titled “Zen Space”, the show includes sculptures in copper, his kinetic works, paintings and haikus.

He started off as a landscape painter, who later moved on to explore the elements of Zen, mysticism and Buddhism. His world as a person as well as an artist evolved as he explored the idea of being aware of the moment and living each moment intensely. “I dislike being a prisoner of my own image, I have constantly broken rules. Over the years, I have explored many paths, found some treasures and then moved on to a different one. I feel like a wandering cloud with the freedom to move anywhere I wish to, in the wide open sky. I started out as a painter of seascapes and skyscapes, where what was unsaid was more important than what was said,” shares the artist.

In this exhibition, the artist is showcasing a life-size sculpture of a sleeping Buddha. The head of the Buddha is reclined at an angle, which allows the viewers to look at the back, which is patterned like a cave. Satish shares, “The sculpture is called ‘The Buddhas Within’ and its inspiration came from my visit to Sri Lanka in 2004, when the biggest natural disaster struck the Indian Ocean — Tsunami. I was booked in a hotel in Galle which was destroyed by the big waves, many lives were lost, but fortunately because of a mix-up by my travel agent my booking was not confirmed and from the airport I went to my next destination and slept outside the hotel in the hills. I was with Buddha in the Dambulla caves at the time of the tragedy. Buddha was so serene, time stood still. I was devastated by the loss of so may lives and almost felt guilty for escaping. I gazed into his eyes and felt calmed. This sculpture is like a cave behind the reclining big head of Buddha inside which you feel protected; it is large enough for several people to be enveloped within it. There are 1,500 small Buddhas sculpted inside with a life size sleeping Buddha at the centre.”

His collection of haikus presents his characteristic and visually rich calligraphic style. “I started writing haikus almost 30 years back when I was a student in Paris. I was exploring, hitchhiked all over Europe and started writing on the back of napkins, Metro tickets, book margins, sometimes even on the palm of my hand when no paper was available. They are about moments experienced intensely, an insight, a sudden revelation. They are now collected from all these notes painstakingly. Many, many were lost but whatever I could find are now presented with calligraphic drawings and collages in a portfolio,” he shares.

His works, ‘Shunya’ and ‘Meditations on a Mandala’ explore the three-dimensional form of art. “The kinetic sculptures are created keeping the main focus on time or movement. They change every instant, just like life,” he explains and adds, “The inspiration is from the Sufi whirling. Life is like that, there is no duality, light and dark, the fluid and the rigid, the large and the small are one. They make us rethink mankind’s constant quest and search, a restlessness that can succumb to suggestions of accord only when it unites with, not against, nature.”