Portrait of an hotelier as an artist

Abstract Expressionism - developed by a set of New York artists in the 1940s and 50s - is a bold vernacular that finds its authenticity in unmediated emotion. The style heeds the inchoate purity of the unconscious rather than the regulations of rationality. That is why Abstract Expressionism never hardened into the brittle enamel of dogma. Its adherents can choose the gestural lushness of improvisation, as action painters such as Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning did. Or, like the colour field painters Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, they can explore the meditative integrity of a single hue.  
 
For Jiri Kobos, an artist currently based in Mumbai, Abstract Expressionism clarifies the unsettling shifts in cultures, psyches and languages. Kobos, who sporadically establishes a home amid the wild flux of world travel, is a German citizen of Czech origin and comes from Bohemia. To claim Bohemia as their own, the Czechs had to battle Celtic tribes, the cavalry of bellicose nomads called Avars, and the Germans. The turf war began in the 1st century AD and was decisively settled only in the 20th century.  

Kobos contends with his history of displacement by creating a sense of certitude and continuity in his paintings. A large body of his works - 35 paintings, most of them executed recently - will be displayed in a solo exhibition on 25th November at Grand Hyatt. The inexorable impermanence of time, and the human fixation with constancy, are the thematic strands that hold his works together. The Fraction of Time, for example, is a measured frisson of red against a dark background. The form tapers at its fringes and is bisected by a patch of glowing drips. The intersection, it turns out, is the present. In Kobos's vision, the present is not a melancholy fluctuation, it is instead, an affirming moment when one can find meaning unsullied by either memory or hope.
 
The Fire of Reason, a huge 220cm x 180cm canvas, presents a swirling blaze of red relieved by small but resolute streaks of yellow. If red exemplified unrelenting transience for Kobos in the Fraction of Time, it signifies immortality in this painting. The artist's concerns, italicised by a profound intellectual sympathy for Buddhism, can easily elide what is fleeting into a part of a wholesome and unending spiritual cycle.

Kobos' paintings speak with assurance because he eschews the sentimental. Familiar symbolisms tend to nudge a work towards the reductive sloganeering of greeting cards. Kobos, however, tempers the unencumbered forcefulness of emotions with his cerebral impulses. "I am stimulated by forms, dimensions and moods. I find it a challenge to represent a moment that makes me question myself."

Kobos has exhibited in Singapore, Baku, Jakarta and Moscow. When not trying to decode the works of his favourite artists Hans Hoffman and Ad Reinhardt, or the intricacies of Zen Buddhism, Kobos manages the Hyatt Regency in Mumbai.