Prabhu Harsoor’s practice unfolds as a palimpsest, a layered field of marks, notations, and recollections where the act of drawing becomes both testimony and invocation. Moving across ink, pigment, and graphite, his works resist fixed categorisation. They inhabit the thresholds between pedagogical exercise, ritual object, and political document.

Rooted in the visual and craft traditions of southern India, Harsoor’s language draws from temple iconography, inscriptional tablets, folk motifs, and the measured geometries of the yantra. These references never settle into static illustration. They remain alive as operative diagrams, propositions for seeing and sensing, open to the viewer’s attunement rather than closed by definitive meaning. This is a visual thinking that recalls the Indian philosophical understanding of darshana as both “seeing” and “being seen,” where perception is an act of mutual presence and transformation. It also resonates with the Advaitic idea that all forms are transient manifestations of the same underlying reality, a visual echo of Brahman revealing itself through multiplicity.

The Grid emerges not only as a compositional scaffold but as a social matrix, a map for the structures of caste, the networks of labour, and the changing architectures of cities in transition. The Glyph appears both as sign and as enigma, guarding the right to opacity described by Édouard Glissant as a necessary resistance to the totalising pull of interpretation. The Genius Loci, the spirit of place, inhabits Harsoor’s work in the form of unblinking eyes, masks, musical instruments, and patterns that oscillate between root systems, constellations, and unseen architectures of thought. This multiplicity recalls the Purusha Sukta of the Rigveda, where the cosmic being’s body is imagined as the source of all worlds, each part holding the memory of the whole.

Many works bear inscriptions in Kannada, dates, and references to lived events, whether the tragedy of a train accident during the pandemic or the steady migration of rural communities toward urban peripheries. Here Harsoor’s art enacts what Walter Benjamin named Jetztzeit, the charged now-time where past and present fold into one another. His drawings and paintings are not only compositions but mnemonic vessels, objects that remember and ask us to remember in return.

His role as educator runs alongside his role as artist. Works that originate in the classroom evolve into visual scores for contemplation, embodying bell hooks’ vision of teaching to transgress, where learning is a collaborative making of meaning.

In a time when images move with accelerating speed, Harsoor turns toward slowness, toward the patient inhabiting the space between seeing and sensing. In Grids, Glyphs and Genii, form becomes prayer, and mark-making becomes witness. The diagram is never a conclusion. It is an opening, an invitation to dwell in the liminal zone where the historical meets the mythic, where the personal merges with the collective, and where the visible converses with the invisible.