This work is part of T.V. Santhosh’s first solo exhibition titled, One hand clapping/siren, that featured a body of near-monochromatic paintings. These works are consumed with providing a snapshot in much the same way that the news media might. However, Santhosh’s “cinematic” or “hyperrealist” depictions of situational conflict, make them impossible to simply glance at – there is an unsettling, yet imperceptible force that...
This work is part of T.V. Santhosh’s first solo exhibition titled, One hand clapping/siren, that featured a body of near-monochromatic paintings. These works are consumed with providing a snapshot in much the same way that the news media might. However, Santhosh’s “cinematic” or “hyperrealist” depictions of situational conflict, make them impossible to simply glance at – there is an unsettling, yet imperceptible force that demands “We cannot glaze past it as we do with the news, nor can we take comfort in it, as we do with myths domesticated by conventional imagery…
Santhosh works with pictoral readymades of expressive culture, drawing his sources materials from magazines and television, but also from art history and world cinema…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, Santhosh’s 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…
Significantly, the artist is preoccupied with the distortion of science and technology into vehicles of terror: the laboratory, as much as the battlefield, is where the action of his paintings is set…The austere priest, quoted from a Gothic altar and set in the background of “Machine Milking’, appears to be praying both for the cow geared to a milking apparatus, and for us, reluctant citizens of a planet imperiled by such lords of war.” (Ranjit Hoskote, One hand clapping/siren, The Guild Art Gallery, 2003)