The Guild at 101TOKYO Contemporary Art Fair 2008

T V Santhosh acquired his Bachelors in Painting from the Visva Bharati University at Shantiniketan in 1994 and his Masters in Sculpture from the MS University in Baroda in 1997. T.V.Santhosh has been part of several group shows in the United States, India, Italy, UK and New York. Some of his most promising and accomplished shows of the year 2007 are ‘YEAR 07’ London, SH Contemporary, ’Continuity and Transformation’ Museum show promoted by Provincia di Milano, Italy and ‘Aftershock’ at Sainsbury Centre, Contemporary Art Norwich, England in 2007.

The hallucinatory intensity of T.V.Santhosh’s work belies an impassioned sensibility. The key themes of his works are War and Catastrophe. He has a taste for translating current events even as they unfold, into narratives that are too allegorical to be history, yet too mutable to be myth. He works with pictorial ready-mades of expressive culture sourced from, magazines, television, art history and also world cinema. In T.V..Santhosh’s paintings the objects and figures’ tonal values are reversed like the images seen through thermo graphic camera, or x-ray in neon pinks, purples and greens. As the viewer is drawn into Santhosh’s melt of color, s/he will probably assume that a simple logic of shift could translate the negative into the positive and vice versa. But, in fact, the images are two versions of an individual original which do not necessarily have an inverse relationship with each other. Therefore, both the negative and the positive aspects of the same image appear spectral and indefinable, and remind us that there is no hard-edged truth. Especially in the context of global crisis, the truth can only be approached through multiple versions.

Baiju Parthan was born in Kerala in 1956, he is a cutting edge artist who lives and works in Bombay. He has done his BSC in Botany, studied painting from 1978-83 at the art school in Goa and he has a Master’s degree in Comparative Mythology at Bombay University. In 1995, Parthan began studying computers, learning hardware engineering, building his own machines and creating programmes. Parthan began to study the Indian mystical arts, exploring tantra, ritual arts, and Indian mythology. Simultaneously, Western art continued to exert an influence.

Baiju Parthan’s art practice revolves around information technology and its impact on perception and meaning generation. His art explores how information streams alter our perception of reality and how new categories of experience, generically termed as ‘virtual’ reshape our cherished ideas about the world. Parthan is especially interested in the influence of technology on religious beliefs, the implications of genetic engineering and the possibilities of post-humanism(that is: the development of symbiotic relations between men and machines). His narratives are reminiscent, in equal measure, of the mediaeval romance, the esoteric illuminated manuscripts and the maps of cyberspace, they attest to the swirling ancestries we carry within us. The philosophical question to which Parthan’s art is addressed to is this: How can the schizophrenia that afflicts everyman, induced by the sharpened contradictions of contemporary life be overcome? How can the varying inner natures of the individual be brought into accord, into a condition of empathy among themselves? He is an artist who is entirely in synchrony with that underground history of our age, which is being written in the catacombs, and cathedrals of the Internet.