Quiet Places by Brave Singh

Interior Landscapes

Landscape, as a painting genre, has a long and established tradition: from the rugged English countryside of Constable to the bucolic farmlands of Amorsolo. A place usually bereft of human markers, a landscape nonetheless is a snapshot of nature seen through a human lens—an unchanging feature of the world in which the elements sublimely combine to create a moment of precarious but achievable balance.

In the works of Brave Singh in his solo exhibition, Quiet Places, landscape is the main subject matter, but this is not the landscape of the visible world. It is an interior one, whose light, mood, and atmospheric effects are modulated by psychological and emotional states. From the melancholic woods of “Sober and Ashen” to the furious crimson sky of “Silent Range” to the looming dark clouds tinged with hopelessness of “Fallen,” each landscape embodies a human experience, a visual expression of an inner life.

The viewer can approach the works of Singh as a literal cry in the woods, a desire to be heard in the thickets of vulnerability. Something brews in each work that the landscape, at any moment, seems that it is about to reveal something at once startlingly profound and illuminating. In fact, drips of paint cascade from the world of the painting to the world of the viewer, underscoring that the landscape is not some autonomous realm contained within the parameters of a frame but an actual one, breaking through reality.

In “Continuum,” a diptych, Singh presents two pieces of scenery—a mountain range vaulted by a night sky and a sun-drenched field—connected not merely by proximity and juxtaposition but by a kind of creeping growth: an ecological umbilical cord. This connection happens in the real world, inviting the viewer to traverse one side of the work to the other through an actual physical space.

For Singh, the “quiet places” in his works are opportunities for self-reflection, in which one can reckon with life’s “mysterious ordeal,” the present state of things where we begin to ask, “Am I on the right ground to soar?” and how “the comfort of life sometimes conceals the real meaning of happiness.”

“We tend to forget the sacrifices and struggles we made,” Singh states. “Alongside this ordeal are the unending support of our loved ones, our roots, and our own places where we pick up the perfect pace as we exist. And the right time to assess what we were and what we have become is to indulge ourselves as we reflect in our own quiet places.” This exhibition by Brave Singh is an invitation for such a reflective indulgence.

– Carlomar Arcangel Daoana