For the Catalogue of Om Prakash’s 54th Solo Exhibition at Lalit Kala Akademi
The present exhibition of cosmographic paintings by Prof. Om Prakash Sharma are the randoms of the stream of consciousness, gathering impressions from his hieratic genes, in the unity of wisdom of auto-consciousness. His golden mind comes flooding, lapping and dancing in colours of abstract forms, wherein the present flows into the eternal. They link the passing time of consciousness to the world of interior time. In the words of philosopher G.E. Moore, the canvases of Om Prakash are “the pleasures of human intercourse and enjoyment of the beautiful”. His aesthetic moorings, in the web of the real behind appearances, lead the viewer into the realms of Shunyata where values blossom. From the flux of life and the muddle of the spirit, Om Prakash transports his admirers into states of that vision which they aspire to have. The ceaseless, multi-leveled flow of colours, lines, and geometric forms of Om Prakash become the stream of thought, where the eyes move in retrospect and in anticipation. They are works of aesthetic freedom, an experience of a luminous halo, a transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning to the end. They are the uncircumcised modernity of the Spirit, a mixture of the alien and external with the interior mythographies. These canvases are a triumph of the jingle and subtle of the invisible, the unseen, the unknown, drumming through the eyes to the ecstasy of Becoming. In them, past and present line together in immutable Reality and in the flux of appearances. In these paintings Om Prakash true to his genes merges himself into the interior light the maya of antarjyoti, to create luminous flashes of cosmic bonds of Being. Arising form the cosmic consciousness, the alaya-vijnana of the Classical mandalas, they are the light that emerges from the insurgency of maya. Buddhist affirm an essential identity between pollution and purification, between impurity and purity that transcends the intellective state, as in Om Prakash’s “Exotic Shrine”.
The Classical Buddhist mandalas choreograph the five luminous elements, the pancha-rashmi of the Guhya-Samaja. Luminous epiphany is the centre of the mystic process leading to a stream of ecstatic wisdom i.e. the indescribable awakened state. Om Prakash renews this exhilarating sense of freedom, or in the inimitable words of a Tibetan yogini.
“Kye Ho ! Wonderful !
When one experiences reality
The whole sky cannot contain her bliss ”
The mandalas are a unison of the human, the cosmic and the divine. They are the coming together of pravritti and nivritti , the exchange of indulgence and reticence. They are the depths in the innermost being of sentience, where the mind and the universes move into ever widening Awakening. They are the essential unity of the worldliness and the Consciousness of humans. Extreme serenity and extreme passion, the most abstract defined by the most carnal, the invisible and intangible in the intoxication of the senses : it is the oneness of the mind of the universe and of the divine in the living non-duality of the basest and the noblest. The body itself is a divine mansion ( mandala ). The yogini Niguma says :
“The divine male and divine female unite ……
Spiritual ecstasy increases;
The elixir of union, blue in colour,
Fills the body from the heart downward,….
Purifying causes of misery and mental deplements. ”
Mandalas summon us to ensphere ourselves in the heart of Diminished Humanity, wherein we perceive the fusion of the eternal Spirit, the earth, the sky, and the stars, in the long pilgrimage of living; where the body and the spiritual self are one; where gods make love in the midst of fire; where purity and orgy are fragments of life and liberation.
The canvases of Om Prakash roar above the clouds in the depth of their colours. The rays of the sun serenely pass the psalm of his mind for the angels to come down to earth, stripped naked in their diaphany. His colours, empowered with the robustness form, flow into the eyes of the viewer in a kiss of silence. They are sparks of beauty out of the furnace of the Divine. They are versatile poiesis , ever on the move, ever deepening, ever rising to newer sensitivities.
Prof. Lokesh Chandra
World famous Indologist and eminent Buddhist Scholar,
Former Member of Parliament,
Director, International Academy of Indian Culture
20 Sept. 2007 – For the catalogue of Om Prakash’s 54th Solo Exhibition at Lalit Kala Akademi – New Delhi – September 2007