It is a rare artist who can convey, convincingly, the sense of being face to face with the source of being. Adi Da can clearly live in the depths without succumbing to their pressure, bringing back pearls of art to prove it.

Indeed, again and again Adi Da’s photographs convey a sense of aesthetic as well as physical ecstasy. Virtually all of his images are masterpieces of abstraction—ecstatic visions of the female body that are simultaneously formal epiphanies.

Donald Kuspit

Author, Scholar
and Art Critic

 

I believe that art should always be a surprise. It must create, even in the critic, not emotion, but a sense of insecurity. When one views Adi Da’s art, it’s easy to see “pop art”, “optical art”, all the possible linguistic, ethnological, and iconographic references – but, in the end, the final work is always a surprise. With Adi Da’s work. I didn’t simply find myself in front of a new personal iconographic universe but rather in front of images that returned me to an experience of "epiphany".

Achille Bonito Oliva

Italian art critic, historian, and past Director of the Venice Biennale

 

Adi Da's pursuit of the spiritual paths found in early abstraction, from Kandinsky to Mondrian, and his translation of that pursuit into the digital age, restore a transcendental spirituality to the materialism of the machine aesthetic.

Peter Weibel

Director, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe

 

The experience of Adi Da Samraj’s work is not "photographic" in the traditional sense. This work is about something more than photography as we are used to experiencing it. Yes, his camera still has a lens—that is its point of view, its point of you. But suppose the point of you disappears, for a sixtieth of a second. What happens?

The "instants" recorded by Adi Da Samraj are the clicks of a train leaving the station of the familiar. Traveling with him, you might lose yourself in the midst of blacks, of grays, of whites. As you do this, you will recognize the space of his images as one of your own. The center has shifted. You are in the "bright room." We always were.

Michel Karman

Internationally Renowned and Award-Winning Master Printer

 

The artwork of Adi Da Samraj engages subjects exotic and mundane, beautiful and homely, elegant and rough. Through the often-manifold repetition of images arranged in patterns, Adi Da devises myriad visual mantras, as expansive in their rhythms as they are in their colors and contours – patterns that at first seem symmetric but subtly reveal their dissonances and metamorphoses. These apparent slippages are sources of revelation here, pathways in their very imperfection to the divine.

Peter Frank

Senior Curator Riverside Art Museum, Author, Critic

 

The work of Adi Da Samraj breaks the traditional rules and conventions of standard photographic practice—not as formalist exercise or to participate in the (conventional) games of the avant-garde, but rather as a means of creating true visionary art. There is in this work a refreshing sense of play, of experimentation, of pushing the medium to communicate the ineffable. Alchemical transformations are at work here.

David T. Hanson

Professor of photography (retired)
Rhode Island School of Design