Important Notice

Trained as a sculptor, T.V. Santhosh held his first solo show of paintings in 2003. This canvas, from his earliest series of paintings, reflects the artist's commitment to voicing his concerns about the precipice over which he believes our world dangerously teeters. Through this sharply focused image, Santhosh neatly encapsulates his chief concern - that all human achievement, art in particular, is marred by the perseverance of violence and the... Trained as a sculptor, T.V. Santhosh held his first solo show of paintings in 2003. This canvas, from his earliest series of paintings, reflects the artist's commitment to voicing his concerns about the precipice over which he believes our world dangerously teeters. Through this sharply focused image, Santhosh neatly encapsulates his chief concern - that all human achievement, art in particular, is marred by the perseverance of violence and the misuse of science.

Santhosh belongs to a generation of artists that draws on media generated images to question both historical events as well as current issues. His works document with photograph-like precision the artist's observations and concerns. Though he draws his materials from the news media, cinema and art history, "...his pattern of selection is determined… 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" (Ranjit Hoskote, "Transfigurations at the Margin of Blur", One Hand Clapping/Siren, The Guild Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2003, not paginated). In the present lot, for example, the artist pairs the image of a kneeling angel offering benediction, likely borrowed from a renaissance painting, with a besieged harbour full of battleships, probably sourced from the news-media.

A dramatic use of light in Santhosh's early paintings like this one helps define his cinematic hyperrealism and the thought-provoking temper of his compositions. To enhance his media-sourced images and the discomfort they cause the viewer, the artist also pairs these 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." The blurred panel to the right of the main image in this piece perhaps represents Santhosh's premonitions about the austere future that awaits us, a time of "cosmic radiation" and "microbiological skeins" (Ibid.).

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