Important Notice

Nataraj Sharma "... appears to stand a little off-centre, in the half-shade, half-light locus of the observer/participant. Living in Baroda, a university town on the extended brink of expansion, he negotiates an imagistic world that pushes for recognition of the phenomenological in the everyday and the poetic in the quotidian." (Gayatri Sinha, "Timeline", Stretch 2006, New Delhi: Bodhi Art exhibition catalogue, 2007, p. 126)

... Nataraj Sharma "... appears to stand a little off-centre, in the half-shade, half-light locus of the observer/participant. Living in Baroda, a university town on the extended brink of expansion, he negotiates an imagistic world that pushes for recognition of the phenomenological in the everyday and the poetic in the quotidian." (Gayatri Sinha, "Timeline", Stretch 2006, New Delhi: Bodhi Art exhibition catalogue, 2007, p. 126)

According to critic Grant Watson, Spy in the House of Love was inspired by a dilapidated mansion in the artist's neighbourhood. The room in which the man is crouched suggests imprisonment brought on by a sense of alienation and exclusion. The man's only means of escape is through the spyhole "...through which he can see a man and woman engaged in sexual intercourse, the movement of their bodies becoming a sequence of shapes from the Kama Sutra, their soft curves seeming to multiply and mimic architectural details. The man's act of transgression floods the scene with an erotic and masturbatory charge, rendering his condition of imprisonment within this structure irrelevant..." (Gayatri Sinha ed., Voices of Change: 20 Indian Artists, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2010, pp. 102-103)

This transgressive gaze, even more explicit from the viewer's perspective, forms the subject matter of this work. "In this unexpected painting the nude figure crouches to look into copulating figures bathed in the hues of love making. The effect of the crouching voyeur is manifold. Through a translucency of effect, he appears to look into a lantern lit interior; of a house of love, where the sheath like membrane of rice paper separates the inner from the outer world. The evocations of the painting are manifold, not the least of which are the voyeur/artist's own state of dream/reverie, of remembered pleasure... As the spy looks onto the scene he is eroticized not only by his own nude form, but by his covert forbidden gaze. The voyeur figure set up what in Nataraj's painting is the outward/inward gaze, one that does not engage either the viewer or manifestly with the presences of its own locus, but appears to gaze outward and beyond. It is this other state, of recollection or reverie, of the intersticial space of the past or the future that lends his painting its gently seductive quality." (Sinha, Stretch 2006, pp. 133-134)

In the background, Sharma evokes the characteristic dark and harsh wasteland of his earlier paintings, rendering the delicate, dollhouse-like quality of the rosy pink and flesh toned house even more fragile.

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