To understand intimacy, one has to enter a space that shelters the earliest memories of warmth, where time is indefinitely compressed and has no duration. To understand intimacy, one has to enter a home where between the fragments of spaces solitude, silence and daydreams are sheltered. For home is an act of intimacy, and memories of intimacy serenade through deep slumber and reveries. Home is in all its phenomenological sense, a complex cosmology and cannot be reduced to its mere physicality or the objects it holds nor the metaphorical implications of it. For amid conversations, negotiations and gestures, each one yet preserves memories of silence and solitude at the same time. The home eventually does become a dialectic space where objects, bodies, dreams, conflicts, solitude and silence come into an intimate confluence.

Mehak Garg’s paintings are a breathing archive of this dialectic intimacy succinctly becoming a mirror for the viewer’s own experiences and memories of intimacies in our homes. To see Garg’s images, one is tempted to borrow Gaston Bachelard’s topoanalysis which would be a systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives – sites one negotiates or negotiated in our earliest memories of shelter. As a viewer to these images, questions abound – what form of memory lingers behind the blue door? Why was the light from the kitchen always warm? How long did the evening breeze linger in the corridor? In between corners, corridors, windows and doors, where did the people in the images daydreamed or found silence in their thoughts? And how in the act of intimacy, objects and the physicality of a home attain meaning and agency? 

Pondering on these questions, without realizing we slip into our subconscious and memories of our own homes – either distant or present surface. The poetry of Garg’s images in all its unusualness is an eulogy to the human’s most sacred space – shelter, refuge, cave, home and slowly lays down bare the complexities of that cosmology.