Ashoo Sharma's Mountain Metaphor

Review/Dr Ved Prakash Bhardwaj

Ashoo Sharma in his exhibition 

Art is an extension of experience. An artist filters lived reality through cognition and discernment, translating it into visual language. Having spent many years among rugged mountain peaks, Ashoo Sharma first captured these experiences through photography and later began expressing them through painting. His solo exhibition Mountain Metaphor opens on February 20, 2026, at the Convention Fair Gallery of the India Habitat Centre in Delhi.

Ashoo Sharma in his exhibition 

with Dr Ved Prakash Bhardwaj

A distinctive feature of this exhibition is the predominance of black and white works. Some pieces employ coloured ink and pastel, yet it is the black ink and pen works that leave the strongest impression. In these compositions, alongside the height and grandeur of the mountains, a mystical and philosophical dimension emerges.

Ashoo’s creative process operates on two interconnected levels. The first concerns the mountain as a physical form. Here, he renders its morphological structure with precision. In his pen-and-ink works on paper, the physicality of the mountain is articulated through two tonal intensities—light and heavy. Erosion, geological layering, and subtle traces of biological presence become visible. The mountains appear not as static masses but as entities shaped by time and life.

The second level transforms the mountain into a metaphor—not in any literal or illustrative sense, but as a metaphor for life itself. Life, thrilling in its diversity, finds resonance in the mountain’s permanence and vulnerability. In works shaped with brush and ink, Ashoo moves toward abstraction. He loosens the solidity of the mountain form, introducing fluidity. Instead of filling the shape completely, he leaves intentional voids between brushstrokes. These empty spaces destabilise the solidity of the structure, allowing abstraction to breathe within it. The mountain becomes less an object and more an experience.

These works often transcend conventional imagery. At times, the viewer perceives not only mountains but also organic forms—suggestions of living bodies, even human figures—emerging from the terrain. The mountain oscillates between landscape and life.

In Indian cultural imagination, mountains are divine presences. Their existence is not confined to stone, vegetation, and ice; they are receptive to vibrant life and spiritual resonance. For a sensitive and poetic mind, mountains pulse with consciousness. This sense of divinity can also be found in the works of Nicholas Roerich, who depicted the Himalayas in luminous colour. Ashoo, however, rarely relies on colour. His language is more restrained, more distilled.

His background in photography has sharpened his sensitivity to negative space. He brings this sensibility into his ink paintings. The empty space between black strokes becomes a metaphor for movement, for breath—almost a heartbeat within the mountain. It suggests life not through depiction, but through absence.

To internalise this metaphor, Ashoo has travelled extensively in mountainous regions, spending countless nights under open skies. He has observed the shifting colours of rock under moonlight, the play of stars across dark ridges, and the subtle transitions of semi-darkness. His relationship with the mountain feels intimate and inseparable. It is as if the mountain accompanies him—conversing, travelling, pulsating, even humming.

This humming metaphor—of solid stone rippling with inner life—runs through his black ink works as well as his coloured inks and pastels. He avoids watercolour, preferring the brilliance and immediacy of ink. The medium once used to tint black-and-white photographs fascinated him, and he adopted it to express the mountain’s chromatic moods. Though coloured ink lacks the transparency of watercolour, his handling of sky tones and earth hues feels lyrical—almost musical.

In Ashoo Sharma’s paintings, mountains are not merely landscapes. They become metaphors for life, music, and poetry. Through disciplined restraint and deliberate emptiness, he transforms even inanimate stone into a field of consciousness.