Charles Green, critic and artist, writing on Yatri's 1998 SANSKRITI exhibition in New Delhi.
Shruti Yatri's paintings reflect two nations and two lives: India (he was raised in Agra and lived in India until he was 26) and New Zealand (he lives in Auckland, New Zealand's largest city, and exhibits there regularly). His paintings show this clearly: on the one hand, Tantric symbols and Sanskrit letters; on the other, the spatial divisions and severe monochromatic monumentality that distinguishes New Zealand art. Even in 1998, mountains, water, wilderness and sea remain an overwhelming influenc of the great New Zealand artist, Colin McCahon, who, during the 1950s, developed an immensely powerful visual language based on painted words where content was also form. Behind this, for all New Zealanders, there's the perpetual collision between Maori and Pakeha (white) cultures.
At first sight, his relationship to mystical Indian iconography is straightforward: an attitude of homage to ancient tradition. I think, however, that his relationship to this past, and the two words are crucial, is more inflected than this. It is inflected by his position inside two cultures in transition, a position that is both a personal disadvantage (it makes for invisibility) and a particular point of cultural leverage. His iridescent paints and semi-transparent glazes, laid across the skin-like surface of intimately-sized panels, don't just depict these symbols– these iconic, potent yantras. They obliterate and deface them.
This isn't iconoclasm: it's something more complex and more truthful. Shruti Yatri can see, as very few foreign visitors can, the self-destructive contradictions loose in contemporary Indian society: how rampant, crazy materialism sits side by side with crises in public education, utilities, and health care; how comatose bureaucracy intersects with karma; how frustration meets real generosity and individuals of great vision. His obliteration, therefore, is not irreverent. It's more a portrait of a culture at a point where society itself is rapidly undergoing a profound dislocation of culture from identity.
Like all accurate portraits, there's beauty (the pearlescent gold) and ugliness (the grey, worked opacity). We might look to dissident Georges Bataille, for whom clarity (the preferred quality of didactic, social realist art) was inconsistent with true communication. Bataille theorised that the passage if ideas from one subject to another required the condition of obscurity; poetry and obscurity go together. Like it or not, in Martin Jay's words, meaning is “like and endless labyrinth in which no thread led to an ‘outside' of clarity and illumination, a verbal equivalent of Bataille's informe.”
Yatri's pictures are both deeply respectful and angry at the same time. This is given extra weight by his hyphenated identity. He works in a liminal zone, a zone, strangely enough, that New Zealand painting has made its own, in which two or more navigating systems are managed simultaneously. Living as go-between across cultures so violent and exotic, its no wonder that Shruti Yatri's pictures are so insistently transcendent and black.
Bernadette Rae: Rich Sound of Canvas: NZ Herald March 1994
The 18 works in Shruti Yatri’s first solo show, which opened at the Warwick Brown Gallery this week, are personal “yatras” or drawn “mantras” – visual representations of special sounds.
Yatri, one of just two contemporary Indian artists working in` New Zealand, is a master of fine arts student at Elam. And his work caused more than a passing ripple at the school’s end of year show in 1993. His exhibition is titled Dhvani (sounds) and each painting represents a different letter of the 50 character Sanscrit alphabet.
The works consist of an acrylic gesso base, mixed with Auckland’s volcanic sand then dragged and sculpted into sweeping curves, soft angles and sensuous planes. This tactile base is later coloured in oils. The effect is of old parchment or ancient stone and the colours are as subtly rich as a vedic chant, enlivened in occasional bright bursts, which are as clear as the chimes of a prayer bell.
Warwick Brown considers Yatri to be one of the best painters to emerge from Elam in recent years. His talent is also measured by a growing number of buyers, including both Canterbury and Auckland Universities. This is vitally encouraging to Yatri; at 42, with a wife and a six-year-old son he is two decades ahead of most of his art school cohorts. His success has been hard won. He has always combined his studies with work, at nights, as a chef.
Though born in India Yatri had an Anglican and “Oxford standard" education in a missionary school where he always excelled in art. All his schoolwork was marked in Britain and the art competitions that Yatri frequently won were also judged there. But any dream of a career in art was left behind with his school days. “Indian parents are more interested in their sons becoming doctors - it is hard to survive in India as an artist."
So Yatri went to work as a commercial gardener and in tourism before meeting the New Zealander who was to become his wife. The couple settled in Hasting in 1976 and Yatri found employment in orchards.
But fine arts still lured him and he began taking classes in the evenings at Hastings Boys’ High School. A series of summer schools - run by artists such as Carol Shepheard, Terry Stringer, Geoff Fuller and Murray Grimsdale - further inspired him.He moved to Auckland to attend classes at the Auckland Society of Arts, working five nights a week in restaurants, taking classes the other two nights and painting during the day. There was a brief stint in Australia and a trip back to India.
Another Wanganui summer school, run 'by Philippa Blair, tipped the balance. “It was 15 days and 300 people. It was such a buzz I knew I had to do something and do it in a concentrated way.” His application for Elam was accepted. "Things have become really clear over the last four years at Elam. My work is progressing and I am getting a good response. “I really know what I want and it is as if in the last years I was gearing up training for it.”
Yatri’s work is special for its ethnic veracity but is a long way from a simple reproduction of elements of old temple paintings. “India had an oral tradition dealing with historical facts and religious stories long before the written word," he says. “The oral tradition was called Sruti, in Sanscrit, or Shruti in Hindi – for which I was named. It means 'the remembered word.’” In the oral tradition each sound was associated with a deity. As the written language evolved the letters that represent those sounds also became deified.
A mantra, or recitation, is not merely words, says Yatri,” but a series of vibrations which can invoke energy if pronounced and practised in the proper way. A yantra has similar powers. “I am not a practitioner,” he confesses, “more an intrigued student.”
He also speaks of his attraction to Kali, - the mother goddess of the Hindus, of the “underlying unity of all things,” and the Tantric philosophy of balancing the male and female energies and of the cyclical nature of time. Others frequently find landscapes or other natural formations in his works - have even seen them as aerial views of a motorway system. But lf Yatri is working at some disadvantage because his subject is not always recognised intellectually, he is not disturbed by that.“People tell me they are very moved by the paintings,” he says. “They describe them as ‘spiritual’ and 'healing' ”