Important Notice

An artist immersed in the socio-political concerns, T. V. Santhosh addresses several significant contemporary issues in his work. In a world dominated by violence, and viewed exclusively through lenses provided by a global media industry, Santhosh uses his paintings to question representation and to divine the unseen and unreported.

Part of a series of negative images in jarring greens and purples that the artist worked on in 2005, the... An artist immersed in the socio-political concerns, T. V. Santhosh addresses several significant contemporary issues in his work. In a world dominated by violence, and viewed exclusively through lenses provided by a global media industry, Santhosh uses his paintings to question representation and to divine the unseen and unreported.

Part of a series of negative images in jarring greens and purples that the artist worked on in 2005, the present lot shakes viewers out of their reveries, challenging them to closely interrogate the images they digest on a daily basis. “A photographic negative is usually the ‘original’ from which a photograph is printed, and so lies the paradox of Santhosh’s method of revealing the concealed truths of war. The inversion of the image gives the picture a new context and meaning as the darkest areas in the original image are transformed into the brightest highlights” (Anne Fleetwood and Connor Macklin, False Promises, Grosvenor Gallery and the Guild Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2005).

As the artist elaborates, “Turning a positive photographic image into its negative creates a more intense and stark feel of reality. Negative images invoke the inverse aspects of 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” (Generation i, Saffronart & The Guild exhibition catalogue, 2004).

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