NS Harsha: Camel and the tent times

Again, and again, and again depicts a group of peasant farmers, knee-deep in paddy, who continue with their work during what looks to be a solar eclipse. They stoop and peer in the dark, as if uncertain, their watery world illuminated with lamps. The title Again, and again, and again might also refer to the quality of tenacity on display. How people throughout history have persevered. In spite of an inauspicious cosmic alignment, in the face of fire, famine, flood and war, always reconstructing, like ants whose nest has been poked with a stick. Demonstrating the centrality of human labour throughout history.

Lamps appear in almost every one of these paintings. In A zephyr over a collective dream the disruptive element (the breach) is an invisible wind that blows in from behind the canvas – or is it from the onlooker’s gaze? – guttering the rows of lamps, causing their flames to dip and dim but never go out. Rather than religious connotations, here the lamps represent energy: civilisational, hinge of the economy, rationale for war. Coal, oil, liquified gas, the rare earths needed to make solar panels, all of these dug up from the earth by the workers that we find depicted elsewhere in NS Harsha’s paintings and throughout his works.

In Digging for quarks drama at upper deck, one of the workers has organised his life around this process of extraction. Behind the digger truck, a makeshift encampment has been assembled out of a few necessities, as well as some items required for the worker’s amusement, intermingled with planets and subatomic particles. A table, a gas cooker, clothes drying on the line, bedding, a violin, a couple of books. Devoid of human figures, the arrangement could stand in for all the individuals, communities, cities and regions, that spring up around sites of extraction, only to be swept away in time as capital moves on, to occupy another geography, take advantage of a different population.

‘In a few strokes the artist lays down a gestural mark, then in a subsequent step, transforms this mark into a structure on which to perch agrarian workers, their tools and machinery, along with strutting egrets following in the farmer’s footsteps…’

Sometimes the breach is a splash, a Cy Twombly scribble, a water mark. At a formal level these paintings play with spontaneous gestures that seem to threaten the equilibrium of the whole. It is as if the artist wants to sabotage his own skilful brushwork, to throw his paintings into jeopardy and then recuperate them. In Harvest as a water mark, a jade green monochrome is disrupted by a flick of the brush loaded with purple-pink paint. In a few strokes the artist lays down a gestural mark, then in a subsequent step, transforms this mark into a structure on which to perch agrarian workers, their tools and machinery, along with strutting egrets following in the farmer’s footsteps, as well as the ubiquitous lamps. The water marks of the title might be the subtle splodges of pale gold that seem to lurk beneath the surface like the ephemeral promise of a reward to come. In other works, water dropped onto canvas, painted a bluish black, then left overnight, creates a paddy field or an aquatic landscape across which to dispatch a flotilla of flickering lights.