T.V. Santhosh

             

T V Santhosh was born in Kerala and received his Bachelors in painting from the Visva Bharati University at Shantiniketan in 1994 and his Masters in Art from the MS University in Baroda in 1997. He has been part of several group shows in the United States, India, Germany and Portugal and New York. He lives and works in Mumbai. 

T.V Santhosh’s paintings have earned him front-place amongst the generation of    Indian artists that emerged during the late 1990’s. In the earlier years Santhosh produced drawings and than moved over to works with historical references. Then came images of war – the photographs of wars have played a very significant role in formulating santhosh’s language. What strikes us immediately about T.V.Santhosh is his grasp of the crises of our globalized present and his taste for translating current events, even as they unfold. His works can at first sight appear cryptic and contained, but a closer examination reveals its provocative use of images, laid out for viewing with seemingly deceptive ease. His art is attentive to the specific idioms of contemporary global conflict, to the diabolical pact between knowledge and terror and the skewed antagonism between puissant globality and weakened locality. One chooses to speak most extensively about the paintings of Santhosh because of the manner in which he subverts the individual and the received image to create a strong historical resonance.

He has been appropriating in his 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 his 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, his recent works deal with the kind of devised ‘glimpses’ of a much larger, unresolved stories of immediate happenings.

This distinctive stylistic treatment, which makes Santhosh’s paintings recognizable without being predictable, subsumes three cardinal elements: first, a mode of representation that has erroneously been termed photo-realism; second, a tuning of chromatic scale that tends to the near-monochrome, or more often, bi-chrome; and third, an incremental transfiguration of the material, by degree and detail, that is all the more shocking for its unobtrusiveness. It is this mysterious undertone, which prevents Santhosh’s paintings from being generic.

The artist is regularly featured in Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Saffron Art auctions and Philip de Pury. He lives and works in Mumbai.

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