Harihara

I was walking past this temple niche for Shiva/Vishnu from Madhya Pradesh -- and time stopped.

It wasn't the central figure -- which seemed no more than formulaic -- but the figures on the side -- as they caught the late afternoon sun -- and created an empty space between them that never left the 9th Century.







I'm doubting that photos can convey that delicious sense of space -- but here's another, slightly different view that might help reconstruct the volumes in the imagination.

The thing about deep relief is that it bites into -- includes -- the space of the room -- the space also inhabited by the viewer --- so a viewer so inclined, can become immersed in the mind of the sculptor -- which in this case -- moved ever-ever-so-slowly-and-carefully -- weighing, turning, composing every volume, every nuance.




Here's the rest of the piece (maybe the presence of Shiva/Vishnu was too powerful for me to want to photograph it the first time around)