T.V. Santhosh
at
Grosvenor Gallery
37 Albemarle Street, London,
W1S 4 JF
T
V Santhosh is a rising star of the contemporary Indian art scene. This is
his third solo show and his first in London.
Santhosh’s
work
tackles the relentless presence of violence and injustice in history. His
canvases confront
the hard-hitting subjects of war and terrorism seeking to question the
influence of politics and media on these global issues, most notably their
representation and manipulation of the events.
“…One
looks at the world through a tinted spectacles of ‘news reports’, that
unroll the stories of massacre of innocents, spectacular highlights of
explosions, flux of faces of people who make headlines, spitting the words
of hate and arrogance and the kinds of propaganda campaigns that just
struggle to hide nothing but truth. It is a strange world exposed and
manipulated. A world where one does not know who the real enemy is, yet
‘terror’ is the common word for both those who resist and those who
attack. It is one’s extended vision that construct and reshapes the
perceptions of the ‘present’. And it is riddled with a number of eternal
questions and a couple of ready-made yet elusive solutions, which I am
interested with. It is the touch and smell of the ‘present’ I am dealing
with in my works, in a process to find a solution, where the praxis of
language becomes one with the perceptions of reality.”
He
appropriates references from such sources as magazines, newspapers and
television. The influence of print media is reflected in the photographic
quality of his works, both in their clarity and composition. The viewer is
placed at the center of the action, whether pressed up against the nose of
the sniffer dog in Whose War is It?
or standing directly over the unexploded bombs in Waste Land of a History Lesson.
Our
sense of a stolen, even covert viewpoint is heightened by Santhosh’s
painterly technique and palette. The objects and figures tonal values are
reversed like the image seen through thermographic
camera, or xray in
neon neon pinks, purples
and greens.
Such
solarisation, or negative imagery is a defining part of Santhosh’s work.
In his last show works were mainly
diptychs, a device he employed so that he could juxtapose both positive and
negative images side by side. However, in these works Santhosh fuses both
the negative and positive within one single frame.
A photographic negative is usually the 'original'
from which a photograph is printed, and so lies the paradox of Santhosh’s
method of revealing the concealed truths of war. The inversion of the image
gives the picture a new context and meaning as the darkest areas in the
original image are transformed into the brightest highlights.
“More
recently, I have been appropriating in my works the logic of turning a
positive photographic image into its negative. Negative images evoke the
inverse aspects of the phenomena. As certain elements get deleted and become
unrecognizable, they reveal an event’s hidden implications. In the
process, the elements of ‘local’ lose their specificity, attaining
instead a universal significance and vice versa. Marking a shift from my
earlier paintings and its linguistic concerns, which dealt with a world as
seen through the pages of history that tells its stories through the images
of metaphors, my recent works deals with the kind of devised ‘glimpses’
of a much larger, unresolved stories of immediate happenings…”
Santhosh’s
technique owes much to the modern masters before him. Man Ray’s
‘Rayograms’ for example were a simple process of exposing a simple everyday object,
say an egg-beater, cigarette or light-bulb, against photographic paper to
create a negative image of the object.
The technique allowed him to subvert the object and to re interpret
it, and it became a favourite of the Surrealists.
Likewise,
the Pop artist Andy Warhol is famous for his inverted images of the icons
and symbols of his time, from Marilyn
Monroe to The Electric Chair.
Santhosh however takes this technique and brings it into the 21st Century by using images from today’s society. At the turn of the 19th Century, which was also the beginning of the Modern Art Movement Baudelaire made a calling to young artists to “ il faut etre de son temps”, to be of their time, and Santhosh is one such artist.
Anne Fleetwood and Conor Macklin
****************
Bio-Data
1968: Born in Kerala
1989: Studied painting, Institute of Fine Arts, Trichur.
1994: B.F.A in Sculpture, Kalabhavan, Santiniketan, West Bengal.
1997: M (Fine) in Sculpture, Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S.U, Baroda.
Awards
1997
: Kerala Lalit Kala Academy State Award
1997 : Inlaks Foundation (Indian)
1997 : National Scholarship
1997 : Kanoria Scholarship
1994 : Ramkinker Award
1990 to 94 : Viswabharathi Merit Scholarship.
Solo Exhibitions
2004:
Unresolved Stories, at Nature Morte, Delhi, in collaboration with
The Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai.
2003:
'One Hand Clapping/Siren' presented by The Guild Art Gallery at the
Jehangir Art Gallery
1997: Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU, Baroda.
Selected Group Exhibitions
2005:
Kaam, at Arts India, New York.
Change Of Address, at The Guild Art gallery, Mumbai.
Paths
of Progression, Saffronart and Bodhi Art, Delhi, Mumbai, New York and
Singapore.
Whose Space
is it Anyway?, Gallery Espace
in collaboration with The Guild Art Gallery,Delhi.
Are We Like This Only, Vadhera, Delhi.
2004: Anticipations, Jahangir, Mumbai.
Bombay Boys, Palette Art Gallery, Delhi.
A Tribute to Bhupen Khakhar, Tao Art Gallery, Mumbai.
Viart Gallery, Delhi.
Zoom! Art in Contemporary India, curated by Nancy Adajania & Luis
Serpa,
Culturegest, Lisbon.
Generation I, Saffron Art Gallery in collaboration with The Guild Art Gallery,Mumbai,
Red, Palette Art Gallery, Delhi,
Looking back, Looking forward, Sarjan Art Gallery, Baroda,
Bifocal
Vision: The Near and The Far In Contemporary Indian Art,
Edificio Sede da Caixa Geral de
Depositos, Lisboa / Lisbon
2003:
Harmony Show 03, Nehru
Centre
Crossing
generations:diverge, curated by Geeta Kapur & Chaitanya Sambrani,
presented by Chemould Gallery, at
NGMA Mumbai.
The
Dual Path of Indian Art Today, Galerie Muller & Plate, Munchen.
High
Lights, Sakshi, Mumbai
Group Show, at Sakshi, Bangalore.
Works on paper, Saffronart Online show.
2002:
Art Edge, curated by Anupa
Mehta, Presented by Fine Art Company, at NGMA, Mumbai & India Habitat
Centre, Delhi.
Trans-figuration,
curated by Yashodhara Dalmia, Presented by Art Inc, at India Habitat Centre,
Delhi.
Words
and Images,
The Guild Art Gallery, at NGMA, Mumbai.
Quotable
Stencil,
Curated by Himanshu Desai, at Tao Art Gallery, Mumbai.
Cross
Currents,
Curated by Anupa Mehta, at Jahangir Art Gallery.
Creative
Space, Sakshi
Gallery, at India Habitat Centre, Delhi.
Mela-a-Carnival
of India, Curated by Anupa Mehta, RPG Show at Jehangir Art Gallery.
Tribute
to Picasso,
The Guild Art Gallery
The
Human Factor, The
Guild Art Gallery at Jehangir Art Gallery.
Harmony Show 02, Nehru Centre
2001
Excerpts
from my diary pages, Curated by Sasha Altaf, at Fine Art Company
Gallery.
Engendering
Images of Women, at
The Guild Art Gallery.
Harmony Show 01, Nehru Centre
2000
Exile
and Longing, Lakeeren Art Gallery.
Functional Objects, Kala Ghoda Show at The Guild Art Gallery.
1997: Group Show,
Visual arts Centre, Ahmedabad.
Kerala State Exhibition.
1996: Bombay Art Society.
1993: Group Show; at
Birla Academy for Arts and Crafts, Calcutta.
AIFACS Exhibition-Delhi.