The tradition of executing yantras is the direct ancestor of Indian Tantric art of today. But yantras were drawn in accordance with strict rules of composition governing the production of symbols, while contemporary neo-Tantric artists broke away from traditional representations of yantras and treated the abstract forms as ends in themselves and not as symbols for something else.

This element in our abstract tradition was a break from the past. Its exponents like Gaganendranath Tagore, Ramkinkar Baij and V S Gaitonde broke away from the representational academic traditional art schools which encouraged the painting of buxom females in epic contexts, but not without a touch of the erotic, as in Ravi Varma's rendering of epic heroines.

Indian abstraction is a fine blend of the material and spiritual, the non-representational and the contemplative. As such it stands somewhere on the borderline of the abstract proper and the symbol. It is perhaps this limitation over the fields of ritual, symbols and material organisation in space that has made Indian abstract art popular among those who find mere visual statements difficult to relate to. The exhibition of Mr Sohan Qadri at the Kumar Art Gallery in Delhi is one of the better example of this art in the country.

His use of osmosis, filtering colour through the paper, grouping the surface and suffusing the paper with pure colours and evolving rhythms that communicate magnetic fields and energy in motion reminding one that Tantra is primarily a concern with energy, the visual aspect of which is what Mr Qadri is concerned with. The freeing of these compositional arrangements from the ritual mumbo-jumbo and degenerate practices involved with it is an important task the contemporary artists must address themselves to if this art is to survive.

-Suneet Chopra