"T.V. Santhosh: Translating Current Events"
2004-07-28 until 2004-08-03
Guild Art Gallery
Mumbai, , IN India

The Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai, India presents one of the cutting edge artist of Indian Contemporary Art - T.V. SANTHOSH. T.V. Santhosh uses photographic references – so as to be ‘arrived at’. The logic, he follows is something Irony. These ironies are played at different level. Firstly, is the way images are juxtaposed i.e. the painting is separated into two ironies, and each part is having there own irony. Another level of irony is the very much feel of photograph, something that is external reality or ordinary reality; that actually deals with metaphorical reality, it means that every images that he has used can have different levels of meaning.

Although the images goes through a metaphorical journey; he makes the look, unreal as the real. And his painterly attempt is not a aim at itself but as a device to arrive the feel of photograph, though it is not.

He paints with a very soft and monotonous feel, which talks something about memories or past. And at the same time it has the meaning of reality that is documented. His previous works were having statements. And in his recent works most paintings have the war images which gradually comes into his works.

The artist says, "painting has one purpose which is to be documental and is beyond the reality; abstract."

Born 1968 in Kerala.  Obtained B.F.A. (Sculpture) from Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan and M.F.A. (Sculpture), M.S.U. Baroda.  Recipient of Vishwa Bharati Merit Scholarship; Ram Kinkar Award;  Kanoria Scholarship and Inlaks Foundation (Indian). Has participated in group shows at AIFACS, New Delhi;  ‘Exile and Longing’ Lakeeren;  ‘Engendering – Images of Women’ at The Guild; Harmony show and ‘Excerpts from My Diary Pages’ at Fine Art Company gallery. Participated in Bifocal Vision: The Near and The Far In Contemporary Indian Art, Edificio Sede da Caixa Geral de Depositos, Lisboa / Lisbon, 2004.

"What strikes us immediately about Santhosh is his grasp of the crises of our globalised present, his taste for translating current events, even as they unfold, into narratives that are too allegorical to be history, yet too mutable to be myth. In common with many of his contemporaries, Santhosh works with the pictorial readymades of expressive culture, drawing his source materials from magazines and television, but also from art history and world cinema. His pattern of selection is determined, however, by the key themes of war and catastrophe: his is an art attentive to the specific idioms of contemporary global conflict, to the diabolical pact between knowledge and terror, the skewed antagonism between puissant globality and weakened locality. We enter his narratives midway into the action, in medias res: formally, Santhoshís paintings focus on a moment of crisis or a sudden manifestation; this figurative focal image is often bordered by a margin of blur, its abstraction suggestive of cosmic radiation, microbiological skeins, or a close-up view of fabric or flesh."

- Extract from essay by Ranjit Hoskote

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