Important Notice

In the present lot, one of T.V. Santhosh’s earlier canvases, the artist examines the uneasy relationship between science, technology, ambition, progress and violence, particularly the way in which human achievement is marred by the misuse of science and technology in the perseverance of violence. On the left of the clearly divided surface, a young soldier calmly straddles a heavy looking piece of artillery, naively examining another smaller... In the present lot, one of T.V. Santhosh’s earlier canvases, the artist examines the uneasy relationship between science, technology, ambition, progress and violence, particularly the way in which human achievement is marred by the misuse of science and technology in the perseverance of violence. On the left of the clearly divided surface, a young soldier calmly straddles a heavy looking piece of artillery, naively examining another smaller shell in his hands. While the other shells around him have been crumpled and used, these two are perhaps, as the artist suggests in the title, live or ‘unexploded’. Contrasting this sharply focused image with the blurred panel to the soldier’s right that depicts a mushroom cloud over post-apocalyptic landscape bathed in neon green, the artist hints at the unforgiving fall-out that such situations can spawn.

To enhance his media-sourced images and the discomfort they cause the viewer, Santhosh pairs this juxtaposition of visuals with a severely restricted palette. “The adherence to the near-chromatic, often bichromatic tonal scale is one of the firmest rules of Santhosh’s pictorial game. It conveys the dramatic expressive strength of black-and-white cinema; in consequence, his paintings resemble stills extracted from old films, tinted and enhanced with additional material. Crucially, although he draws from diverse sources, Santhosh never organizes his paintings as palimpsests or collages; instead, he integrates the hybridity of their origins into amalgams, delivering each painting as a miniature reality, magically rendered more real than life” (Ranjit Hoskote, “Transfigurations at the Margin of Blur”, One Hand Clapping/Siren, Guild Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2003, unpaginated).

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