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. Narayan grew up in an automotive factory - a place his father had founded and ran.
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'. 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. Even when it is abstracted by the lack of an explanation, a language we understand or forms unknown to us. 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. having not gone to art school has saved him from a pedantic approach to art. 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. 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 of grime, chaos, arguing shopkeepers who do not forget the inherent humour, chivalry, closeness, anger and deep love. In cities intimacy and beauty are not a give-in, you need patience in its pace to recognise its many forms. But the city performs its beauty, something similar Narayan saw in Nalhati. Growing up in a post-industrial landscape as an auto-didact artist Narayan Sinha sculpts our self-reflection as art.
- Sumesh Sharma
