नख़रा | نَخْرَہ
(tr) coquetry, blandishment, amorous playfulness, airs, affectation, pretence
Kuldeep Singh’s first solo exhibition in Mumbai, Nakhra: Towards Sacred Sensuality, unfolds like an alaap that never quite reaches its crescendo—enticing, elusive, and charged with a quiet, sacred eroticism.
This body of work bridges two seemingly disparate yet intimately connected worlds: classical Indian dance and painting. Singh, trained as an Odissi dancer, extends his rhythmic instincts onto the canvas, creating what he calls ‘choreographic paintings.’ His Neo [queer] Ragamala series transposes movement into delicate geometric patterns, capturing the ephemeral gestures of dance within the permanence of oil on canvas. But this is more than an aesthetic pursuit. It is an exploration of the intersection between sensuality and spirituality, the erotic and the divine, all viewed through a distinctly contemporary and ecological lens. The historic Ragamala paintings, which Singh references and reinterprets, were originally conceived as a synthesis of art forms—music, poetry, and miniature painting—each raga personified through colour, mood, season, and emotion. It is fitting, then, that Singh, himself a practitioner of multiple disciplines, takes on this genre with the same unifying impulse. His decade-long training in Odissi informs the very core of his practice, making his canvases feel like an extension of movement itself. The soul of the work is in this confluence, between past and present, body and environment, sound and silence.
But these are not mere contemporary renditions of a centuries-old form. Singh, based in New York, populates his canvases with figures that stretch languidly across impastoed landscapes. These are not courtiers or mythical lovers from the sixteenth century, but friends, lovers, and strangers of today. There is an inherent intimacy in these figures; they imbibe emotion, a quiet charge of longing, hesitation, or mischief. In Chris Looked Away, a figure turns slightly, a moment caught between movement and stillness. Advent in Raag Bhimpalasi, which references a hauntingly sweet raga often played on the flute, is complemented by Descent in Tribhang, harking to the classical Odissi posture in which the body bends at the knees, hips, shoulders, and neck, creating a serpentine fluidity.
The hanging of the exhibition itself is a choreography. Large canvases are hung low, drawing the viewer into an intimate engagement with the figures. Smaller works are positioned at varying heights, compelling the eye to travel, mimicking the fluidity of Singh’s practice. A salon-style wall clusters together sketches and canvases. Portraits gaze at one another, creating an ecosystem of glances, gestures, and unfinished dialogues. Ever so often, a disembodied fragment catches your eye, like a hand reaching towards something just beyond the surface of the frame—a memory, a touch, an echo of movement now stilled.
The figures in Singh’s work are undeniably sensual, yet always restrained. In Together in Raag Yaman, two figures exchange glances, their bodies in close proximity yet never touching. There is a quiet tension: mischief restrained by decorum, intimacy held in suspension. Most of the figures remain solitary, existing within expansive colour fields that pulse with emotive intensity. This is where Singh’s work transcends mere representation. It is not just about the body, but the space around it, the negative spaces of longing and restraint, of what is offered and what is withheld.
The notion of nakhra—coquetry, affectation, a performance of allure—sits at the heart of this exhibition. Singh’s figures flirt with visibility, at times boldly present, at others slipping into abstraction. His brushwork, at once gestural and meticulous, mirrors this duality. They embody the way he works, whimsically yet meticulously, balancing precision with an expressive looseness that allows his figures to breathe, to feel alive within their painted worlds. These paintings invite desire, but they also refuse full revelation. They demand slow looking, an attunement to the micro-expressions of the figures, the interplay of colour and texture, the pauses between movement and stillness.
Singh’s practice is deeply informed by a conceptual inquiry into the correlation between ecology, the human body, and classical Indian music entwined with movement. He describes his approach as an attempt to entangle these elements, to generate new permutations between bodies, topographies, and musical structures. This sensibility permeates his work: his figures seem to emerge from their landscapes, not placed upon them, their forms shaped by the
rhythm of the world around them.
This is not just a revival of the Ragamala tradition; it is a radical reimagination. By queering the form, Singh questions the heteronormative structures inherent in these classical traditions.
By weaving in ecological concerns, he expands the scope of what these paintings can represent. The result is a body of work that is deeply rooted in tradition yet unafraid to subvert it, to bend it—like a dancer’s body in the tribhanga—to accommodate new meanings, new identities, new ways of being.
Singh’s paintings offer a world that is both intimate and expansive, inviting the viewer into a space of contemplation and movement. A world that is at once familiar and strange, structured yet improvisational, sacred yet playful. A world where bodies become music, where glances hold stories, where colours hum with the resonance of a distant raga. And in this world, as in life, everything is a performance: fleeting, seductive, just out of reach. The stage is set. You, too, are invited to perform.
-Anish Gawande
27 February, 2025
