Important Notice

The main thrust of Nataraj Sharma’s work has always been a “…dialogue with the fraught relationship between urbanization, the landscape, and human presences at the interstices of modernity” (Chaitanya Sambrani, “On the Double Edge of Desire”, Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India, Asia Society, New York, 2005, p. 29).

In extending this dialogue, Sharma’s diverse oeuvre has repeatedly turned to the landscape, whether viewed from a... The main thrust of Nataraj Sharma’s work has always been a “…dialogue with the fraught relationship between urbanization, the landscape, and human presences at the interstices of modernity” (Chaitanya Sambrani, “On the Double Edge of Desire”, Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India, Asia Society, New York, 2005, p. 29).

In extending this dialogue, Sharma’s diverse oeuvre has repeatedly turned to the landscape, whether viewed from a comfortable distance or in an uneasy close-up, whether densely populated or pristinely uninhabited. As Deepak Ananth notes, however, this does not necessarily indicate “…a binary or dichotomous postulate but rather something that is assumed by the artist as a part of modernity’s ambivalent legacy” (“Changing Planes”, Indian Summer, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, p. 64). It is this anxiety inducing ambivalence, an unfortunate quality of modern existence according to the artist, which concerns him and informs his work.

This painting, an expansive landscape interrupted only by a solitary, saddled horse, may appear naïve, but this simplicity is deceptive. Here, Sharma communicates the same “sense of anomie” and isolation that his early portraits of labourers, his etchings of motionless cranes and vacant construction sites, and his lands strewn with odd pieces of rusting machinery do (Ibid.). As Peter Nagy notes, this particular work also extends the “technical finesse” and “epic subjects” of the artist’s earlier paintings. “A visit to the remote points of the Gujarat peninsula seems to have instigated Nataraj’s most optical capabilities. Saturated colours have been orchestrated into resounding compositions that startle with both their simplicity and charged effects. Atmosphere itself seems to be the subject of these works, the tricks that light and water play on the eyes and the brain as they combine in space and change over time” (“To Bridle the Tremours – Nataraj Sharma’s painterly path”, Nataraj Sharma, Bose Pacia exhibition catalogue, 2005, not paginated).

Using the formal device of a diptych to divide the desiccated land and the abandoned horse from the cloud-filled sky above, the artist adds to the uneasy atmosphere of this painting by suggesting through the disconnect that the cloudburst that appears imminent in the upper panel may not necessarily quench the arid land below it.

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