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Artist or Maker: T.V. Santhosh (B. 1968)
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Notes: PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION, NEW YORK STATE
T.V. Santhosh confronts the inexorable presence of violence and injustice both today and throughout history in his large scale paintings. Questioning the representation of war and terrorism in the media, Santhosh adopts a cynical view of the biases inherent in our current visual culture, juxtaposing images in his paintings which call into question the authenticity of newspaper and television journalism. Stylistically, Santhosh has adopted a unique and striking painting technique which makes his work instantly recognizable. Choosing photographic imagery as his base, he solarizes or reverses the images creating works which conjure the style of an x-ray or film negative.
Speaking of his technique the artist states, "More recently, I have been appropriating in my works the logic of turning a positive photographic image into its negative. Negative images evoke the inverse aspects of the 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. Marking a shift from my earlier paintings and its linguistic concerns, which dealt with a world as seen through the pages of history that tells its stories through the images of metaphors, my recent works deal with the kind of devised 'glimpses' of much larger, unresolved stories of immediate happenings" ( T.V. Santhosh - False Promises , Exhibition Catalogue, Grosvenor Gallery, London, November - December 2005.)
In this work, Santhosh uses the loaded iconography of the burkha clad woman, placing his figures before an almost radioactive sunset. Faceless and looking forward into an unseen future, or in terms of the work's title, "Across an Unresolved Story," the figures seem on the brink of an impending apocalypse. Santhosh's "unresolved story," personified in molten colors and photorealistic detail, conjures images of chemical toxicity and nuclear explosions while addressing current issues of feminism and religious fundamentalism.
