‘The Return of the Baroque’ at Akara Contemporary!

November 28, 2023

‘The Return of the Baroque’ - Installation View

Mumbai – 28^th November

‘The Return of the Baroque’ by Jonathan Trayte and Rebecca Sharp is currently going on at Akara Contemporary at Colaba in Mumbai.

IMG_20231109_205726 - Copy — Rebecca Sharp – ‘Oferenda’

In his curatorial note Ranjit Hoskote mentions the following. “Sharp, whose paintings draw as much on the vibrant folk-Catholicism of South America as on the surrealism of Leonora Carrington, invites us to open ourselves to the plural dimensions of space, time and identity that we inhabit, and which we do not always acknowledge. Trayte, whose sculptures gesture as much towards Claes Oldenburg as towards Ettore Sottsass, urges us to blur the genre distinctions we make between materials and experiences, underlines the similarity between sugar and glass, flour and plaster…”

IMG_20231109_205837 - Copy — Jonathan Trayte – ‘Plums Bitten’

“…What strikes me most compellingly is that both these artists return – by routes that are quite distinct and through emphases that do not coincide – to the legacy of the Baroque in all its grand extravagance. Both Sharp and Trayte reclaim the special gifts of the Baroque: its self-aware and astute theatricality, which at its best was not an escape into fantasy but, rather, a sublime enlargement of the alternatives to a constrained normality; and its capacity for defying the proprieties and exceeding the limits of medium, spatial context and intended audience…”

IMG_20231109_210451 - Copy — Rebecca Sharp at Akara Contemporary

IMG_20231109_205736 - Copy — Rebecca Sharp – ‘A Construcao Da Grande Oca’

“…Together Rebecca Sharp and Jonathan Trayte urge us to become active and attentive pilgrims again, rather than indolent passengers riding the algorithmic cascades of narcissism and complacency.”