Beyond Chrysalis
Throughout a most visibly and acoustically fecund professional life, Om Prakash has to project beyond powerful forms and vibrant colors. Inherent in his depiction of such visible and intangible realities, unfold realms beyond appearance, attesting to symbolic and energy interrelationship, Such tangible matter and energy alike are dependent upon the existence of light and light is dependent on sound.
Innate harmonies, whether as diamonds, triangles, circles, mandalas or other geometric forms, or vistas encompassed in window, door and arched portals suggest chords connecting broader dimensions of time and space. Art provides a means to express the imagination in non-grammatic ways that are not tried to the formality of spoken or written language, nor to the invisibility of sound. Cycles of existence pulsate, suggesting metamorphosis. Om Prakash’s creativity defies nomenclature, extending further than definitions of attribution or “isms”. Exploring the elements, diverse spheres come into the picture plane as symbols and surreal imagery: an outer world of surroundings, an inner world of perceptions, and a continuum intersecting and connecting both. One view of these configurations, the Tibetan view, relates these as field through which all facets of nature manifest.
Paralleling the dramatic evolutionary/biological transformation of the butterfly, chrysalis, his work resonates through change and motion. This is what the Russian writer and lepidopterist, Vladimir Nabokov referred to as a “notion of the equivalence of sense data and mental states, an aesthetic feeling for the spiritual essence of reality and the supernatural dimension to repetitions of the visible world.” (Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. Original Title: Conclusive Evidence. New York: Putnam, 1960, 1966.) Each stage of the change gives rise to another, related yet dramatically different, reinforcing the need and felling of the transcendent, of the effect of transmutation.
Elizabeth Rogers.
2012