prasanta sahu

Prasanta Sahu was born in Orissa in 1968. After completing his Diploma in Electrical Engineering from Orissa, He did his BFA in painting from Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan and his MFA in painting from MSU, Baroda.   He has participated in many group shows including: “Merging Culture” at Sarjan art gallery, Baroda 2006. “Palette-II” at Palette art gallery, New Delhi 2005.”Bird on a Wire” at the Arts Trust, Mumbai 2005.”Change of Address” at Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai 2005. “Ways of Seeing”, India Habitat Centre/Art Alive Gallery, New Delhi 2005 “New Wave in Bengal Art- A Critics Choice”- a group show at Gallery Akar Prakar, Kolkata2005 “The Sense of Touch” at Guild art Gallery Mumbai 2005.

“As an artist, behind my perceptions, lie definite acts of choice. I choose to look at images from behind a ‘personal experiential’ database. What I see is transformed by what I know and vice versa.

I find mechanical interventions have made a remarkable impact, on my personal observations. Looking at an enlarged close-up of a small insect in a magazine or at a 60-foot print of a human face in a hoarding change the established knowledge/ information about known objects. The worlds of ‘the macro’ and ‘the micro’ have become easily available to, human mediation and interpretation. This has opened an alternative world -vision in my minds eye. My paintings can be described as parthenogenesis, in the sense, that they are full born in electronic form and translated into pigment as a secondary delivery. To create a new visual experience, initially I start with the photographs, which are carefully planned and shot by me. The selected image is modified and digitally reworked upon. The color image is converted to grey scale, blown up to accentuate the textures and finally mapped onto the canvas, where this process of making is not extraneous; rather it is integral to the extension of the language of painting which engages with the technological and cultural materials of its time.

Alongside technical innovations, I remain as fascinated by the use of the more traditional processes of making art. At every level there is a constant play between opposites. The original image, although elaborated through technology, is ultimately painted painstakingly using a paintbrush. Yet, I deliberately aim to erase any sign of human touch in the final painting. There is no “struggle” with the canvas, and the “imaginary” factor of image making has given way to a planned process, whereby in the end result, nothing is left to chance. I try to create a tension, a pull between two opposite factors- that of mechanical reproduction and manual rendering. It becomes difficult to know which subverts which, the machine or the man. Thus the final work creates a doubt in the viewer, whether what he is looking at, is in actuality a painting, or a reproduction on the canvas. Dealing with the human predicament, is my primary subject. At present I am working with human body parts; I ‘skin’ my humans on the canvas. A tiny square inch of human skin is enlarged multiple times transforming into a completely different visual experience. The image breaks into a floating mass of strokes. In the process of transformation the animated quality of the human body is transformed into a dead, inanimate surface. To my mind this is representative of the “arranged” second hand violence, which we confront, every day via the media, viewed clinically from the comforts of our known space. 

In the final painting the image is recognizable, but when split through enlargement and mapped by hand on canvas on a huge scale, it becomes a visual oriented survey-documentation. The image retains the outer shape and the details inside it are transformed into abstract motifs. I call this integrated disintegration. Engaging the self to over paint all these details manually is a mind locking exercise or a slavish act and the final visual along with the whole process may be considered a metaphor for the monotony and repetitions in daily life, the obsessions related with unexposed areas of human mind, youth, sex, physical transformation, & the temporal existence of things.“

The central subject in Prasanta Sahu’s paintings is his own body. Although the artist refrains from conventional self-portraits, he uses his own physical form to initiate a scrutiny into the fragility of the human body. It becomes a metaphor for the obsessions related with youth, sex, physical transformation, and the temporal existence of things. The artist works from self-edited photographic reference, which are modified and reworked upon the canvas. Painting all these details becomes a mind locking exercise, a process of cataloguing and identification. The final object becomes a repeated form— The original image transforms into a visual survey- oriented documentation, which may look like a geographical map or even a piece of fabric. It breaks into a floating mass of strokes and in a close-up view constructs an image within itself which is at the same time macro and micro. The artist calls this integrated -disintegration.