Chant of Centuries

Like many young instrument painters fitted in with New York, Mohan Samant, 37, lives at an unfashionable address in a loft building above a street thrumming with trucks. Unlike other young painters, he begins each day not at the easel but sitting shoeless and cross-legged atop a low podium, drawing out the eerie strains of his native Indian music on the sarangi, a chunky instrument fitted with 29 strings. Says the artist, who though an expatriate is ranked as one of his country's most modern painters, "I always felt at one with things that have a sense of remoteness, which is one reason why I like the sarangi -- from a short distance it sounds like music from thousands of years ago."

Samant paints the way he plays music: he tries to combine in the present moment all the root wisdom of past experience. "I believe that a great work of art is timeless," he says, and he learned his art by studying the paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux, Sumerian tablets, and linear Egyptian murals. Prime examples are now on view at Manhattan's World House Galleries. To recapture timelessness in a modern idiom, Samant works spontaneously like an action painter, performing with his passionate pastel colors in such fast-drying media as spackle and plastic wood. Then he watches the painting for weeks. "If it's good," he shrugs, "it stands out. If it's bad, it fails."

All this seemed pretty untouchable to Samant's well-to-do Brahman family back in Bombay. His father, a high school principal and English teacher, balked at both the sarangi and art as a career for his son--after all, the sarangi is played to accompany dancing prostitutes, and painting is an illustrator's skill. At first, Samant clerked for a British oil company, but at 20 he began five years of study at Bombay's Sir J. J. School of Art. He copied Bashaivali and Jain miniatures to learn design and color, but, says he, "they all looked alike. I was just copying the 17th century." On a fellowship in Rome and later in London, Samant set his sights on all the centuries.

The paintings' titles are arbitrary; Advaitad and Shabda (opposite), for example, means "non-separateness from the impersonal oneness of Brahma" and "a meaningful sound or syllable." The scruffy textures of the paintings suggest weather-beaten walls or the aged face of the earth. Like the art brut, or raw, unpolished art, of France's Dubuffet or Spain's Tapies, these Indian moderns seem to be topographies scarred by glowing fissures, tracks of the varieties of human experience.

Most art brut bears a primordial stamp, but Samant's is sophisticated; his indecipherable scribbles speak to man deeper than the syntax of known language. To Samant, they tell of his own introspection: "It is as if I have walls around me." Yet he speaks to the world through their painterly surfaces, and centuries echo musically off them.

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