Every canvas by N.S. Harsha tells a story. Comprising a cast of outlandish characters, from an octopus-headed lamp-lighter to mutant rats making love, his works —ranging from quotidian to supernatural — allude to a sense of eccentricity as well as perceptive socio-political awareness. In Stomach Studio, Harsha’s first solo exhibition in New Delhi — currently showing at Vadehra Art Gallery — the artist keenly observes our current pandemic-ridden world with both humour and despair. We commissioned New Delhi-based writer Riddhi Dastidar to review the exhibition. 

“Can a person be made of clouds?” was not a question I had asked until about a fortnight ago when I found myself in front of Emission Test, N.S. Harsha’s Where’s Waldo-esque scenescape that renders an indelible pandemic memory as strange and fantastical as it felt. Rows of healthcare workers as stamp-like splotches of blue and white occupy the vast 75 x 90 inch-canvas, taking tests to detect Covid-19. Their expressions are inscrutable, their faces obscured by the bright blue protective gear as they perform this ‘essential’ task for subjects in various states of willingness, seated on red plastic chairs. The first subject that caught my eye was an eruption of bright green parrots, swarming the healthcare worker’s arm, sandwiched between a king and a tiffin-wala who are both more docile. A few rows above, a boy in yellow clutches a valentine bouquet and a red, heart-shaped chocolate box as he gets his throat swabbed. Elsewhere a woman in a superhero costume holds a thunderbolt while a buffalo interrupts the grid. There is pleasure in being faced with such profusion of pattern.

Mysore-based N. S. Harsha’s solo exhibition Stomach Studio — currently on display at New Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery — transfigures the surreal pandemic years into vivid and evocative paintings that cohere to provide a potent snapshot of our absurd times.

A grid of construction workers eating on banana leaves greets us at the entrance, introducing the theme of digestion. The mood is sombre but broken up by a child or a man with a finger up his nose. The painting is titled God’s Own Work — either a gesture to the ‘essential’ nature of the work of those not allowed to migrate back home, or the truly essential nature of rest and eating. The lens through which Harsha views the world is made explicit in his body of work — ranging from installations to paintings — showcasing the link between the individual and collective, the cosmos and the minutiae of local life, and how the latter represents a larger, universal moment. Here, too, he draws on myriad influences from traditional Indian miniatures to school-room charts to represent the accelerated entropy of the Covid years through portraits.

Here on, the exhibition gets stranger, enchanting you into its own language. The Light Brought by the Rats includes mutant rats making love and disintegrating into skeletons. The cost of light or labour? Sometimes life is so serious it demands whimsy. Through repetition and close attention to detail, Harsha succeeds tremendously in a ‘worlding of the portrait,’ as critic Gayatri Sinha’s note for the exhibition states. He goes further with imaginative leaps, bringing interior worlds to the surface in each individual on canvas, all engaged in various versions of the same activity — whether as a Matisse figure, a sleepy nightie-clad auntie with a loose top-knot or a soufflé of blue cumulus clouds on a red plastic chair. Harsha’s subjects are as small as the cosmos in the Periodical Visit of God Particles, and as vast as the everyday intimacies of women in families, entwined by braiding, washing, combing hair in Matriarchal Maps of Matrix.

I was reminded both of artist Priyesh Trivedi’s cult Adarsh Balak series, and, more fancifully, the Soviet-era illustrated children’s books that I rifled through as a child in 1990s Calcutta. Playfulness and ease permeate the paintings even in the darkness. From the acrobatic, flame-wielding monkeys to the electric blue, octopus-headed lamp-lighter to the enormous lobster in the eponymous Stomach Studio, there’s a lightness of hand bringing alive the intricate detail. To me, it also felt like a wilding — expanding the possibilities of how a person or world can be — colours as vivid as limes, human and non-human animals alive with shimmering blue life-force, a knot or squiggle of rats bringing light. I found myself reverting to a childish impulse by the exhibition. I stared, puzzled. I wanted to eat the art.

N.S. Harsha: Stomach Studio is on display at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi until 2 May 2022.

Riddhi Dastidar is a New Delhi-based writer of fiction and non-fiction working on disability justice, gender, human rights, and culture. They are writing their first book, a queer climate-fiction novel-in-stories. Find more of their work here or follow them or Twitter or Instagram.