Stomach Studio: N.S. Harsha

N.S. Harsha gives us a manner of painting which has to be read rather than viewed. In the performative act of moving closer and then further away from each work, or reading it left to right, we engage with an extraordinary language of painting that asks us to look beyond the world of art. Drawing on resemblances across time to the painted panoramas of the East, temple architectural ornamentation of lesser beings, school rooms charts, quotidian acts of a rural economy or the schemata of the Indian miniature, Harsha creates a polyphony of portraits. Seemingly repeated in endless fashion, these nevertheless bear the consistency of music notes, all similar but different. One may sense in his body of work an appetite for a great, sweeping view of communities: in short, a worlding of the portrait.

3 March 2022