Excerpts from the speech

"It is indeed a great pleasure and honour for me to say few words for my senior fellow artist Suresh Sharma. As a person he is simple, good at heart and a very fine painter. His Canvases are flawless and so perfect that, you cannot even think of putting a dot on them. This perfection made him a great artist, and finally he is getting highest honour of art in India by Central Lalit Kala Akademi."

"I congratulate him for the same."

"I consider this occasion a significant one for a number of reasons. Firstly, I feel that art is probably the only discipline which man has been cultivating, even unconsciously in the advancement of civilization from the earliest times. Secondly, it gives opportunity to meet persons of the same fraternity. Thirdly, the most important one is, in recognizing life time achievements of a senior artist like Suresh Sharma."

"Following the usual tradition, I shall, in this address, report some theoretical analysis, on recent works by Suresh Sharma."

"In his work, one can observe several transparent surfaces very close to each other on the picture plane; each one adds some sort of colour or textured span, and creating a multicoloured form itself of small thickness out of which suddenly some line or block of strong coloured strips comes out. His work, therefore, is commonly spoken of in relation to coloured textures and vertical strips."

"In order to understand what has been taking place in the work of Suresh Sharma, let me explain some terminology involved."

"Scientists and we artists use Euclidean geometry in describing objects, whose tools are ordered shapes such as a point, a smooth curve, a smooth surface, etc. But natural objects are seldom smooth over several length scales, e.g., Earth’s topography, a mountain, a rock or a stone. These objects exhibit beautiful and complex appearances which cannot be described by the classical Euclidean geometric system. Fractal geometry finds the order behind such disorder of nature. Geological features are scale invariant and have the property of self similarity in different scales. If you take a photograph of a geological feature, it is impossible to determine whether the photograph covers one centimetre or one kilometre. We can observe these qualities in Suresh Sharma’s work."

"Suresh Sharma may not know fractal geometry but he is using its principle intuitively. If you observe his recent works, they are self similar, that is, if you enlarge a small part of his Canvas you see more and more similar forms in it. In fact, these surfaces are created by adding constantly a fractal element. Therefore, we say, these are the subtle structure with infinite embedding. However, his procedure is not a translation of nature into abstraction, it is rather, artist is forcing colour to become a creative means in sensing the beautiful inner life by which related colour respond to each other through functions of life, nature and rhythm. Visual impact of the structure in them is so great that viewer finds himself lost in the colour fields. He has, in fact, demonstrated the creative power of a new tradition by not creating depth in the sense of Renaissance perspective but it is achieved by the creation of variant forces on the picture plane."

Dileep Singh Chauhan