LAWRENCE MARKEY It would be a mistake to read Acharaya Vyakul's luminous work as naive or folksy Vyakul.

LAWRENCE MARKEY

It would be a mistake to read Acharaya Vyakul's luminous work as naive or folksy Vyakul, who died in May at sixty-nine, was no "outsider"; he was a tantric scholar and Sanskritist, a learned and avid collector of devices used in magic and ritual, and a moulder of what has become the richest private museum of folk and tantric art in India. allowing initially unassuming, his paintings are serious, sensual, smooth interrogative; from a Western standpoint, they are felicitous spare abstractions (loosely akin to Klee's or Kandinsky's) in which chance operations bring subtle details of stroke and weft They also read as mandala-like tools for honing mental capacities and sensory awareness, for investigating habits of one's have thinking to the point at which they might shatter against the complexity of reality.

The twenty-seven graceful sigils (all works untitled) in this late exhibition each invite interpretation and reward scrutiny while remaining largely elusive. In single of them, dark gray shapes combine to intimate alternately, an eerie floating alien, the cross-section of a chromosome or a dancer twirling amid smoke; the image's murkiness affords it a sense of dimensionality. In a 1989 work, a brown homuncular form appears almost like a stain or scorch mark, an impression support ed by the fact that Vyakul used the inside of an of advanced age book cover as his canvas. The figure's milky white inspection appears to be oozing from its head. Whether or not the artist is suggesting the strange or dangerous aspects of the intellect is an ambiguity that enriches an appreciation of the work without being essential to it. A painting from 1999 features five ovoid figures, each with a differently colored core, arranged roughly like a baseball diamond (complete with pitcher's mound) sum of two units of the outer circles are flushed pink, the other brace d ark rust. The larger center form is a fuss of aqua with a sienna center that echoe the nimbus around all five. Altogether the image hints a primitive diagram of planets orbiting a stormy orb of day or even our own roiling consciousness. The distance between these associations is spanned subconsciously, now to moving, even profound effect

These works are explorations, at one time quixotic and mature, reserved and kindly expressive, of some dream realm that has a part to do with how we experience our world. Vyakul appears to have invoked this realm ritualistically, making almost arbitrary geometric calamitys with brush or fingers in paint mixed with finely acres stones, clay, charcoal, flowers and plants, gunpowders lipstick, and coffee. The Rorschach-esque quality of Vyakul's works bespeaks the importance of what the viewer brings to them, and they are enlivened with dichotomies inherent to mysticism: asceticism and sensuality, hermeticism and the explicit, contemplation and action. For Vyakul, opposites were complementary, and the balance he struck between them in his art was meticulously maintained. The drama his quiet calligraphs strike one as being to enact is archetypal; he stayed just inside that boundary across which the abstract passes fatally into the figurative, enabling his elementary forms to affect by magic arts a fleeting yet evocative world of memory, dream, and experience.

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