We are catapulted into a world where a cast of characters of the artist’s own invention transcends the realm of the believable; these are anatomical forms, conspicuously out of the ordinary. Harsh intends for the viewer to conjure their own flights of fancy. The figures belong to a different order of being—they could be wizards, clairvoyants and oracles prophesying what is to come; harlequins and tricksters spinning yarn; or voyagers, troubadours and pilgrims traversing from faraway lands. Or they might allude to a clutch of castaways that include stargazers, questors, wool-gatherers, and lotus-eaters. In Loom King (2023), we come face to face with a one-eyed spectral figure encrusted in a mask of dripping vehement red. Are we to read the drips, pools, or body as a run-down, leaking, haemorrhaging organism? These protrusions and overhangs of form, or disfigurement—depending on how the viewer sees it—effortlessly drift towards a sinewy contour of equine forelimbs to form a diptych, echoing seventeenth-century Flemish Baroque artist Anthony van Dyck’s many equestrian portraits. Elsewhere, in Lake Zeal (2022), we meet a phantasmic flint-grey figure with stacked eyes, whose hair is a green river mutating into what might be ceremonial robes, while a striking yellow encircles the crown like a gong. These figures morph and change and evolve, leaving the viewer to imagine the myriad possibilities that spin out of the frame. Between earthly and mystical, bodily and psychic, chimerical and oneiric, their largely stoic countenances either avert your eyes or piercingly return your gaze.
Harsh’s solitary figures speak to each other, just like chapters in a book do. While they inhabit the same alternate cosmos, the paintings aren’t closures but juncture points, or gestures towards a continuous inquiry. Each is distinct, yet they “live in the same energetic field”, to draw a parallel with what playwright Suzan-Lori Parks says about her staged acts. However, there is more than what meets the eye. Harsh’s exploration of these imagined atavistic dreamscapes comprising beings and beasts reveal themselves only after layers of telling and retelling. What is hidden—and not quite in plain sight—is a hornet’s nest that Harsh stirs up.
text by Khorshed Deboo