Amid Great Doubt and Uncertainty

In Chinese painting, landscapes are considered to be the highest form according to the Taoist tradition.  It came to its maturity with the decline of the Tang dynasty, a thousand years ago, when political instability was rife, and the culturati’s retreat to a detached way of life, away from the chaos of human systems, and more attuned to nature and the tao, became the ideal. Landscapes provided sanctuary from the chaos of collapse of the dynasty.

Though less valued in the Western Tradition, which values the presence of human achievement and the subjugation of the natural world, the landscape has often been painted for its capacity to inspire awe by important artists like Turner, Friedrich, Van Gogh, O’Keeffe, Cezzane, Hopper, among many others.

In both cases, the landscape provides a majestic counterpoint to the limitedness of man, particularly in how vast and unchanging it is.  In which case, the landscape makes us aware of how small we are, and how short our mortal lives are, in comparison to nature.

Brave Singh’s Amid Great Doubt and Uncertainty seems to capitalize on these qualities of the landscape.  COVID 19 has certainly made us feel powerless and insignificant in how it has changed our species’ way of life, in a way that approximates the cataclysm of a world war.  There is indeed great doubt and uncertainty as we try globally at first to halt its spread, and when that proved untenable, to mitigate mortality in unprecedented ways that our generation, and indeed all the generations before us, have never seen.

Focusing on the sea, and fusing it with our individual subjectivity through the use of objects meant as emotional triggers – an old chair’s backing, a black frame, a boat, a drift wood, the beach – all relating to our personal memories, and simultaneously, connecting us with loss and oblivion, as with most of Singh’s works have done in the past; provide a metaphor of our own mortality and solitude.  By fusing the objects, here invoking the tradition of the memento mori, with the awe-inspiring landscape, Singh allows us to make the conscious leap between despair and hope, and by analogy, our death or our life.

Amid Great Doubt and Uncertainty, though intended by Singh as an escape from the confinement imposed on us during the pandemic, rather forces us to ask the bigger questions – Are we indeed alone? Do we choose life? Do we matter?  And this is what makes these works, indeed his body of work, important.  These paintings are not for the faint of heart.  But appear more to be for those who are acquainted with loss, but choose to live despite it.

– Ricky Francisco