A series of spherical domes ambulate a nephroid globe, elsewhere the eye is invited to trail the ascent of a helical cone. Constructed as intricate alter-worlds, it is tempting to read the works on view at Bhagyashree Suthar’s solo presentation Suspended Simulacra as abstract landscapes. Yet the surface assembly of recursive forms, belying an eye towards precision and symmetry, is punctured by the appearance of depth—shapes are spliced to reveal their inner worlds, planar incisions infuse an optic kineticism that refuses the petrification of represented landscapes. Evoking a complex liveness that balances eternal forms of geometry with the ephemeral textures of the built, this suite of works are orbital explorations of time and sight, or their entanglements as temporal perception. Suthar contemplates varying scales of time—the utopic futurism of modernist architecture exemplified through the metrics of mass and volume, and the retrotopic survey of personal memory that is occluded, visceral. Turning to public archives of architecture on social media, and to persisting motifs from her own childhood, Suthar undertakes a project of striking magnitude—how to see through and beyond the linear order of time that separates childhood from future, or that severs the transient moment of light passing through a wall of glass from the qualities of contact and translucency that compose the visible world. Working with materials that extenuate the viewer’s engagement with light, Suthar layers her paintings with beeswax, metallic foil and resin, such that the surface inhabits light differentially, shifting with the movement of the viewer’s gaze and the progression of hours in the day. The pursuit for an infinite, porous time in Suthar’s compositions is revelatory—there is a desire to retain universal structures found in the natural world such as the golden ratio, and there is a regard for the amorphous, intangible flickers such as stray petals. The solidity of iconography is appended with an open network of references as vast as the impossible objects drawn by MC Escher, the buildings of Zaha Hadid, the imagined libraries and gardens of Jorge Luis Borges, and the Warburgian pathosformel or “psychic batteries” of emotion. As such, the paintings perform a diagrammatic function—these are models for a synchronic utopia, a future which can be grasped by aging, time-mottled hands. As models, the paintings forge a relationship with a referent that is necessarily absent, immaterial; the paintings stand in to conjure this world of fluid time, to bring it to the purview of sight as simulation, blueprint, or cartographic schema. In Suspended Simulacra, Suthar invites a protracted consideration on what is entailed in perceiving the world, not simply as given phenomenon, but what sustains past the immediacy of the ever-renewing now, and what is emergent across dimensions of space, time and being.