Deb Sinha: “Cult of Beauty”

Further adventures in the enchanted city with a tour guide unafraid to play with magic.

Sinha's flirty subject shoots him (and us) a "Narrowed Gaze."

Storyteller, let’s say you want to create a city from scratch. You’ll begin by whipping up a cast of inhabitants. They’re the reason why towns exists in the first place: they’re spots where your characters might congregate, interact, and develop their own narrative trajectories. Unless you’re an unusual kind of author, you’re going to make these people appealing — attractive to you, and attractive to each other. They’ve got heavy lifting to do. They’ve need to maintain your interest while you’re bringing them to life.

After that, it’s likely that you’ll provide your characters with stuff, because in cities, stuff is everywhere, and so are human hungers. You’ll give them clothing, food, and stray items to hold on to. Perhaps you won’t assign those objects to anybody in particular: you’ll drop them in the vicinity of the characters to create the feeling of abundance, or simply possibility.

Then you’ll be free to design your skyline. You’ll line streets with buildings and pop corner stores and shop signs at intersections. There’d be looming skyscrapers and empty lots waiting for the thwack of the piledriver and the scrape of the crane. And as the map coalesces in your mind, you’d begin to have imaginary encounters with light: here a shadow on a wall, there an object glimpsed through a window, over there a human being, partially obscured in the gloaming, traveling somewhere, carrying mystery with him. Finally, the whole scene would come together in a rush of activity, metaphor, implication, and emotion.

Painter Deb Sinha is not a deliberately sequential artist. Nevertheless, all of his images seem to exist in the same cinematic universe. They’re imbued with the same cosmopolitan spirit and exist in the same metropolis (ours). His canvases represent a perpetually-unfolding urban now — one where the romance of the streetlamp, the muted gorgeousness of the electrified avenue at dusk, the satisfying impersonality of the built environment, and the excitement of the chance encounter is available to you, if you’re interested and you’d like to stop by.

“Cult of Beauty,” a solo show at Art House Productions (345 Marin), is, like all of Sinha’s exhibitions, a city story, full of urbane paintings, skillfully made but never overworked. Each one shimmers with desire.

Curator Andrea McKenna, a practiced hand at telling tales, arranges Sinha’s pieces in a manner that underscores his world-building. First, she shows you the portraits; then, it’s a column of bite-sized still-life paintings of mass-produced objects; then it’s the row houses, stations, and cafes; then comes the rapturous nocturnes of silhouetted figures on busy streets that, in the gloaming, have the natural impressionism of a summer streetscape. In other words: character, then circumstance, then setting, then plot, with themes of ardor and longing woven, deftly, through the entire show. 

Small wonder: a bagel shop you surely know.

McKenna’s amplification of Sinha’s signal helps us understand something about the painter that might elude our notice when we’re encountering his pieces one at a time, as we often do, in group shows and at open studio events. Even when his painterly attention turns on inanimate things, he is always thinking about human beings. Just like New Jersey, his imagination is a densely inhabited place. Not for Sinha is the depopulated landscape or the eerily still still life. Instead, his objects (and many of his people) are firmly handled. The plastic bag of crackers has been torn by hungry hands. Cocktail parasols have been thumbed open, plucked from their drinks, and roughly arrayed on a tabletop. Nobody is queued up at the Wonder Bagels on Christopher Columbus and Jersey Avenue, but the maintenance of the awnings and windows lets you know the shop is braced for the rush.

Sinha’s manner of applying pigment reinforces that feeling of immanence: he likes blunt, thick strokes, fierce and definite, lines that suggest the brisk movement of the wrist and the traction of the brush on the canvas. Even when no one is depicted, everything tells you that a person was there. 

Cream crackers, stripped and exposed.

Then there are the paintings that do contain people. In the streetscapes, his human figures can seem like vectors, traces, mysterious after-images, vapor that condenses in the heat of a city on the move. The members of the crowd gathered around Grand Central Station feel old-fashioned — they’re all as upright as standing-stones — and even though we see them at a distance, Sinha makes sure to dress them smartly and crown their dot-like heads with hats.

Yet their tremulous reflections on the wet pavement suggest transience. In “City Lights 54,” pedestrians are on the move on a rainy night, limbs elongated to keep pace with the skyscrapers, and umbrellas so close to their heads that they look like extensions of their bodies. They’re all crossing the busy street with purpose, but they’re caught between destinations, and they’ve got many steps left to travel. Some of them are spectral figures, merging with the rush hour fog and the blur of taxicabs; one, caught in a crosswalk, is all angles and wisps and sharp edges against the misty air. “City Lights 53” is even spookier: a painting of a solitary figure stepping from sidewalk to asphalt under a lavender sky. The road he’s crossing continues unbroken to the horizon, and streetlights leave smeared streaks of illumination on the street. 

In the city of dancing light: Sinha's nocturnes.

We want to know more about these figures. Instead, Sinha shares more about their town. He extracts colors from the images and affixes perfect circles of pigment atop streetscapes that are otherwise a beautiful blur. They’re evocative of hanging globes, overgrown streetlamps, pixellations, receding tail-lights, droplets of water on a windshield. Sinha’s arrangement of these orbs follows the rhythms of the architecture and the sightlines of the roads. He’s calling attention to the structure of the city, the logic of the built environment, and the tones and details that we might otherwise miss in our rush to get where we’re going. 

Even the subjects of Sinha’s eight portraits are bodies in motion. He’s made sure of that. Their hair, their full lips, their high cheekbones and the rest of their faces are all rendered with energetic, brisk, pointed strokes, as if the sitters couldn’t be counted on to tarry, and the painter had to catch their measure quickly and with urgency. They’re all raffish young men: a little defensive, a little pugnacious, all more than a little dangerous.

"Absolute Focus"

In “Narrowed Gaze,” a roughneck with a look like a young David Johansen splits the difference between suspicion and tough-guy come-on posturing; in “Absolute Focus,” a haughty youth in profile directs a challenging stare toward the artist. Best of all is “Boy Is Green,” a face overcome with crookedness, with closed eyes, nostrils, and mouth all slanted in different direction, colors scrambled, collar buttoned up, but overcome with a sensation of confusion and surprise.

There are girls, no doubt, somewhere in Deb Sinha’s melting towers. But they aren’t the protagonists of this story or the objects of the painter’s restless quest for beauty. You might miss them. I do. But hey, it’s Pride month. And when a designer fills a city with this much enchantment, it’d be an act of ingratitude not to get dizzy and plunge right in.

(The Art House Productions gallery is open from 1 p.m. until 4 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. Deb Sinha will give an artist talk on Sunday, August 17.)

Not easy being green: Sinha's mesmerized "Boy,"