Since returning to painting towards the end of the Covid pandemic after more than ten years of absence, Jeremy Sharma has re-discovered a newfound urgency and intimacy in its representational form. Sharma’s debut solo exhibition at Haridas contemporary features fifteen new paintings.

His recent body of works addresses painting’s porosity to apprehend images from various sources (where digitality and screen captures have become ubiquitous), albeit belatedly, in a serial linen and stretcher format that delivers its subject from a mediated world. In selecting an image, he looks for effects, qualities and values that elicit interest to make a painting. He then acts upon them by extracting, cropping, reducing, magnifying or flattening the image for printing, to paint from.

His subject then becomes one of seeing: a painting’s object and intermediality; its internal logic; its pictorial construction; its emphasis on surface and touch; and its semblance of life. However, painting here is also interested in what is not seen but thought and felt: its peripheries; its silence; and its capacity—to desire, resist, linger upon, probe and take hold of.