As an artist holding onto the role of the artist which is not medium based or reflected on a singular form the practice of Narayan Sinha comes from a study and observation of an environment and its immediate visualities. These are objects that for him as an artist hold conscience. He works in a manner that does not alter the found object but rather he displaces its positioning from its immediate surrounding that arrests the perspective in its design. This act of seeking a potential aesthetic - a vision only seen by Narayan is a peculiar narrative that we see in his visual vocabulary.
Narayan's sculptures aren't just elements of pure abstraction. He is not seeking a nihilism of ideas or just attempting to occupy space through form. Rather this is a conscious effort to find tangible ends to an image that forms in his mind. He grew up in a mofussil town that served as a major transportation hub - Nalhati. Sitting on the intersection of a railway junction, the State Highway 7 and National Highway 14 we encounter a city of garages , automotive factories, bus stands and truckers. Here large buses and trucks get repaired. Narayan grew up in an automotive factory - a place his father had founded and ran. As a child he admired his father, a man who towered over him and saw him working on a monumental scale in a factory that produced automotives.
Personal intimacies privilege our memory, we continue to reside in a past that holds out to how we view the future. Our inclination towards a static painting or a sculpture is animated by the intimacy we hold to the object. Narayan Sinha often sees shapes and life in found objects and their materiality transforms in synonymous imaginary which holds an unspoken beauty. Therefore when an air filter of a truck is juxtaposed beside bronze cast objects in a trellis of frames that hold many varied sculptural components we almost feel the grooves of the air filter to be soft and not metallic. The act of authoring a sculpture by displacing it from its quotidian context allows Narayan to then create objects that he casts in bronze such as a 'branch'.
Imagine a branch occupying space in a room in the Ice Factory which was an old industrial space making ice in the Ballard estate commercial district of Bombay. Here a void exists, a memory of its utility. This void holds many memories of the workers in the space and the ice that might have once occupied its dark interiors. Now emptied out for art - its dimensions and lighting is constantly changing. These exhibitions form temporal relationships between the space, the object and the audience. Narayan beckons you to look beyond while viewing his work, he is asking you to find a reason for intimacy the art work provokes with its form and structure. This could be emotional, sexual, intellectual and aesthetic intimacies along with their cross-section that might evoke happiness and perhaps loss but would also allow you to understand the consciousness of the object. When we see an art work , it is also watching you?
In order to understand this intimacy let us observe the practice of the Senegalese performance artist and painter Issa Samb. Issa Samb aka Joe Ouakam (1945 - 2017) became the first counter-revolutionary to modernism derived from Europe. His portraits were abstracted forms of men and women in the imaginaries of the African traditions, surrealisms derived from the tradition of storytelling and myths of the Sahel, animist dance was married to situationist performances. From 1973 Samb ran Laboratoire Agit'Art, an art collective that moved away from modernist philosophies of Negritude.
Issa Samb's practice of performance transcended gender and he drew inspiration from the vocal techniques used by the Griots or the wandering poets and genealogists of Senegal. When he spoke in a performance you were drawn by both shock and awe. The tactility of the movements in the performance and the props used as both costume and objects held a conscience.
When you view an object the object views you back !It holds implicit information and a dialog often arises as we view it in the audience. This transaction with the artist through their object is intrinsic in the genre of art we deem political. The object often holds its own conscience where the viewer may decide their own authored experience and meaning from which may be an anathema from the artist's intention. This experience is more implicit when it comes to forms of performance. Even when it is abstracted by the lack of an explanation, a language we understand or forms unknown to us.
A march is an expression of protest, a dance is an activity of liberation, singing together means solidarity and speaking to an audience is not symbolic but an act of urgency commanding a change. Such forms hold access and transcend barriers of the art scene and privilege. We do not need language or form to recognise pain or be privileged with history to support a cause. Humans far apart have used performative arts to transmit dissent and inform others of solidarity - actions that are key to human existence.
Narayan began to observe large pieces of scrap made of metal sitting lifeless and discarded across his town discarded by the garages. A certain beauty emerged from this milieu of parts and pieces cut up and left to the elements. They began taking a life of their own in his observations and he was keen to rescue and anoint them with an aesthetic they deserved as objects that had a visual conscience. He would watch his mother and was often eager to construct within his art practice works that could hold the deep sensibility of what care and love could produce. So his effort with these large scale metal objects was never an attempt to change their intrinsic nature by recycling or creating a scrap based sculpture. Rather much like Louise Nevelson he gathered found objects and by placing them together in juxtaposition to each other he builds stories. These could be stories of flight, lightness and fantasy. The sculpture when painted can be a painting and when he paints he could be actually creating a sculpture in his imagination. This interchangeability is essential to understand Narayan as an artist. The work is not dependent on dimensionality of two or three dimensions but its success at engaging the viewer into the realm and vision of the artist.
Arte Povera, which arose from everyday objects in post-industrial and post-war Italy saw artists such as Giovanni Anselmo delve into the practice of examining the nature of the material that held together an object. How the materiality of the object informed its concept. How the concept of displacement into a gallery altered the utility and functionality of an industrial object. An object that held a utility in an industrial or domestic space but when displaced into a white cube we begin to see only the patterns it holds, its hues and pigments, or when juxtaposed - two pieces of stone that sandwich a leaf of cabbage - or when it is etched upon or given a patina- our experience changes. How does an artist transform the view we experience of an innate object into the view they have seen and imagined of it in a way that was unseen until now. Can the exhaust pipe of a large truck hold the shape of a tree? Can grease be a paint? Can the marks of tyres in the slush of a truck parking lot be a pattern or decoration?
Decoration arrives when we are able to recognise a pattern that is repeated with any visual object. It is not determined by beauty as beauty is a subjective emotion. As artists we cannot deny the role beauty holds in our practices. Artists like Narayan realise and understand the potency in everyday scenes and images which they transform into art. A sculpture of many hundred kilos or a ton can have the lightness of a firefly? Well it is in the role of an artist to hold such mirages in front of the audience. The object holds a distinct conscience and history we come to recognise as we view it. Narayan who has been using scrap metal for decades does not alter an object's conscience rather enhances its presence in front of you so you begin to speak of those stories around such objects - those that you hold in your subconscious mind. We have all come across transport hubs, places of dust and detritus but within those spaces to recognise an inherent beauty needs observation, but also emotion, sentimentality and a degree of loss and pain.
Nostalgia infantilizes our memories for our memories are more profound than we imagine them to be. Our experience of the times during the recent covid epidemic come to remind us of our mortality and the urgency we hold with time and the responsibility life gives us to seek our joys. Pain is chaos that enters the long symphony of life. After Covid and after a long moment of seclusion and self-reflection Narayan began casting bronze that held shapes of nature. Amphibian, Vegetal and floral shapes could take on gigantic form as the bronze lent its malleability to the surfaces Narayan was keen to recreate in his sculpture. We do not easily recognise these forms but we see their resonance from life-forms. We all can ascertain that our lives are driven and authored by nature - it is where we can imagine the presence of divinity. Artists have long attempted a search of divinity through organised religion but Narayan is convinced in the void we hold despite claims of spirituality as we ignore the role nature holds in nurturing the lives we have. Narayan creates a spiritual echo in his works - they do not grant wishes or allow you ecstasies of the divine but rather ask you to contemplate the reasons you hold when you view a work of art. Do you see yourself?
We often encounter people unable or afraid of viewing art because they are afraid of understanding the meaning. This archaic need of an art historical explanation is often exhausting and exploitative because the person explaining it to you is giving you his story. When we encounter a shell or stone shaped by the waves of the sea do we ask the same question? We take them home as a memory of a vacation, a short romance and perhaps they still exist with us as souvenirs of our childhoods. We are enchanted by its shape, surface and colour - this static unshapely stone holds much meaning to us. How would you describe visually the love of a father for his daughter? In Art we are shy of emotions in a time where our vulnerabilities are overshadowed by the violence and chaos created by humans. Art often mirrors or tries to resolve the chaos created by humans. We may call this political and time worthy to discuss but self-inquiry into our own inner conflicts could prevent us from addressing our anxieties in the form of violence outside. The Native Rock is a formation of rock easily found in trekking sites, fields, river beds and beaches. They are products of millions of years of sedimentation, erosion by the elements of heat, air and water and sit abandoned in nature where we wish to escape. Narayan addresses this need amongst adults as he forms totems of self-awareness.
Narayan found various materialities and forms as an artist to design pathways of his dreams. His restlessness informs his spontaneous works that come from a lifetime of observation. Having studied science he is an autodidact artist, but one who is a self-proclaimed perfectionist. He has studied bronze casting, printmaking, painting and other varied genres as an apprentice under master artists to find resolution in honing his techniques. But having not gone to art school has saved him from a pedantic approach to art. Where taught imaginaries of perspective, colour theory and art history define an artist's practice. Rather he follows an organic process of experimentation and self-discovery that is planetary in its universality but also drawn from a childhood in an unseen town of Bengal.
This exhibition is an assemblage of sculpture, painting and in-situ experiences inhabiting an Ice Factory near the port of Bombay, its various histories inhabit the choreography of a contemporary exhibition that tells us the very stories that make us. I title it 'intimità personale' , which translates to personal intimacy in Italian. As I write this accompanying essay to his exhibition in Naples, a city which like Bombay is a port, it is a city of grime, chaos, arguing shopkeepers who do not forget the inherent humour, chivalry, closeness, anger and deep love. In these cities intimacy and beauty is not a give-in, you need patience in its pace to recognise its many forms. Naples holds a long history with the production of art, art that now lies covered behind the layers of cathedral walls, catacombs, frescoes and museums. But the city performs its beauty, something similar Narayan saw in Nalhati. In 1968 outside Naples at the sea-resort of Amalfi the Italian critic Germano Celant brought together Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Luciano Fabro, Piero Gilardi, Giuseppe Penone, Emilio Prini, Mario et Marisa Merz, Michelangelo Pistoletto et Gilberto Zorio to convene and form the Arte Povera movement that derived its aesthetics from the detritus of industrialisation. Growing up in a post-industrial landscape as an auto-didact artist Narayan Sinha sculpts our self-reflection as art.
Sumesh Sharma
Naples, March 2025
Sumesh Sharma is a Bombay based curator focusing on alternate art histories, socioeconomics, and cultural politics. His work engages with immigrant cultures, vernacular modernism, and Black consciousness. He curated Dak’Art 2016 and presently works on an extensive research project on aesthetics and its new philosophical bearings that emerge from India & Africa. In January 2023 he curated ‘Mind’s Cupboards ‘a retrospective of the artist Lalitha Lajmi at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, Something Else, Cairo, November 2023 and a trans-generational collaborative public art project in Paris on the contexts of immigration and against the continuous racialization of social dialogue by the right wing. He curated Manu Parekh’s retrospective exhibition ‘60 years of selected works at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai in 2018. He co-founded the Clark House Initiative in 2010 with Zasha Colah. He is currently the Artistic Director of Strangers House, Mumbai.
