Texts: Khorshed Deboo, Arushi Vats
Foreword: Mamta Singhania
Publication Design: Reha Sodhi
“In contemplating matters of seeing, what the eye detects as meaningful on a piece of paper or a marked surface largely hinges on the viewer’s learning and disposition. What is visibly legible—word or image—drifts free of the adjacent vestiges of abandoned language, incomprehensible signs, fibres, or textures. The actual message hangs in the air like thick fog. Nevertheless, there is something particularly alluring about the idea of an erased reality lurking between the lines, or to be revealed gradually if one peels back the layers.
One encounters such an allure in the surfaces that Harsh Nambiar creates—almost infuriatingly out of reach at first glance yet equally enticing. Except that Harsh forsakes realism in favour of rapture and enchantment. Painting in oil, his canvases are free of limitations imposed by meaning or explanation; they hold out against any kind of neat summation. He exploits the fabulous to make sense of the living, to world-build, in a manner of speaking. Rigid human forms are eschewed, offering instead an ontological stance that straddles the figurative and the abstract.”
(excerpt from the catalogue essay, Not knowing is kind of thrilling , by Khorshed Deboo)