In 2016, for his first solo show Surviving Traces, artist Brave Singh painted the objects of his childhood — an old sewing machine, remnants of his grandmother’s piano stool — many of which had been languishing in his family’s ancestral home. It was a time when that home had fallen newly silent: his grandparents and mother had passed away, and all of her siblings had moved to the United States. The objects Singh painted then reminded him of the days when the house was, as he recalls, “full of life”.

Nearly a decade later, Singh returns to the objects of this home for his solo show, What Remains. It marks yet another turning point: his family is now selling the home that has sheltered the artist for more than four decades.

This time, Singh doesn’t just paint these objects — he incorporates some of their remnants directly into his work. In Silent Witness, he transforms the ornately carved back of a chair into a frame. The chair once sat in the home’s terrace, where Singh’s family would take their siesta after lunch. In the work, the frame and the plane around it are painted dark grey, with thick blotches of paint gathering at the bottom of the canvas. Within the frame, Singh paints a small, sepia-toned landscape — appearing like a glimpse of a memory, drifting in the dark of one’s mind. The solidity of the chair’s backrest, now a relic, and the haziness of the landscape heighten the sense of distance between past and present — the futility of recreating the memories that we love the most.

“When fed into the crude, imaginary / machine we call the memory / the brain’s hard pictures / slide into the suggestive / waters of the counterfeit,” writes the poet Chase Twichell in “The Blade of Nostalgia”. In What Remains, Singh returns to the objects of his childhood not to reconstruct gleaming, romanticized images of the past, but to “listen to what lingers”. A kind of melancholy settles over the canvases, as he portrays relics of his family’s history through the lens of the present. The works thus echo the feeling that Twichell describes when recalling the names of one’s childhood loves and losses: “an ache to the teeth / like that of tears withheld.”

In Fragments Remembered, Singh paints the broken pieces of a machuca tile against a muted taupe background. From a distance, the painting almost appears abstract, the object unrecognizable. The tile once lay in his grandparents’ room, which became his mother’s room, and later his own. Every time someone climbed down from the bed, the cracked tiles would clink against its side — a small sound that used to frustrate Singh. Now, as he prepares to leave the house for good, and these tiles cemented in time, he wonders where that sound might find him again.

Written by Nicole Soriano