Lot 42: Order Breaks from Within, 2005

Order Breaks from Within, 2005
Oil on canvas. 72 x 84 ¼ in. (183 x 214 cm) 

 New York, Thomas Erben Gallery, Jyothi Basu: Landscapes Towards a Supreme Fiction, April – May 2006

 Thomas Erben Gallery, ed., Jyothi Basu: Landscapes Towards a Supreme Fiction, New York, 2006, n.p. (illustrated)

 Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai

Living and working in Mumbai, Jyothi Basu’s canvases reflect the dense and frenetic qualities of life in a city of 13 million people. He builds his futurist landscapes from the stuff of science fiction novels, melding bits of utopian idealism to machine entrails and characters from an invented lexicon. Unlike the organic and tangled architecture of Mumbai, his frenzied and codified canvases posses an inherent rectilinear logic, reminiscent of the crosshatchings of electronic circuitry. In spite of their teeming and color saturated compositions, the works maintain a static and quiet electricity, articulated by their lack of human presence an element in stark contrast to his populous home.
In spite of their size, Basu’s canvases have an intricacy which mirrors the meticulous South Asian tradition of miniature painting and the artist’s gem-toned palette simultaneously quotes from this practice. His works seem to exist simultaneously in the realm of the future and of the past.Traces of decay are allowed to seep into his gleaming structures ageing them in spite of their ultramodern design suggesting the omnipresence of our history in our present and future.