Deb Sinha: “Cult of Beauty”
Further adventures in the enchanted city with a tour guide unafraid to play with magic.
Storyteller, let’s say you want to create a city from scratch. You’ll begin by whipping up a cast of inhabitants. They’re the reason why towns exists in the first place: they’re spots where your characters might congregate, interact, and develop their own narrative trajectories. Unless you’re an unusual kind of author, you’re going to make these people appealing — attractive to you, and attractive to each other. They’ve got heavy lifting to do. They’ve need to maintain your interest while you’re bringing them to life.
After that, it’s likely that you’ll provide your characters with stuff, because in cities, stuff is everywhere, and so are human hungers. You’ll give them clothing, food, and stray items to hold on to. Perhaps you won’t assign those objects to anybody in particular: you’ll drop them in the vicinity of the characters to create the feeling of abundance, or simply possibility.
Then you’ll be free to design your skyline. You’ll line streets with buildings and pop corner stores and shop signs at intersections. There’d be looming skyscrapers and empty lots waiting for the thwack of the piledriver and the scrape of the crane. And as the map coalesces in your mind, you’d begin to have imaginary encounters with light: here a shadow on a wall, there an object glimpsed through a window, over there a human being, partially obscured in the gloaming, traveling somewhere, carrying mystery with him. Finally, the whole scene would come together in a rush of activity, metaphor, implication, and emotion.
Painter Deb Sinha is not a deliberately sequential artist. Nevertheless, all of his images seem to exist in the same cinematic universe. They’re imbued with the same cosmopolitan spirit and exist in the same metropolis (ours). His canvases represent a perpetually-unfolding urban now — one where the romance of the streetlamp, the muted gorgeousness of the electrified avenue at dusk, the satisfying impersonality of the built environment, and the excitement of the chance encounter is available to you, if you’re interested and you’d like to stop by.
“Cult of Beauty,” a solo show at Art House Productions (345 Marin), is, like all of Sinha’s exhibitions, a city story, full of urbane paintings, skillfully made but never overworked. Each one shimmers with desire.
Click here to read Tris McCall's review on Eye-Level