Lot 12: T.V. SANTHOSH

Enemies' Enemy II
Signed 'TV Santhosh' on the reverse of each panel.

183 x 244 cm (72 x 96 in).

Diptych: oil on canvas.

2008

Wolverhampton, Initial Access, Frank Cohen Collection: Passage to India II, 17 March - 1 August 2009

The Guild Art Gallery, New York

T.V. Santhosh's work seeks to question the influence of politics and the media, most notably their representation and manipulation of such global issues as violence, injustice, war and terrorism. The present lot, a vibrant diptych which combines elements of photorealism with abstraction, is a prime example of the artist's unique ability to create poignant paintings full of biting critique and subversion. Executed using his emblematic solarization technique - in which tonal values are reversed in neon pinks, purples and greens - Enemies' Enemy II depicts an armed soldier making an arrest in the busy streets of modern-day India. After appropriating the photographic image from a mass-market publication and performing his negative makeover, Santhosh has crossed out the composition with bright yellow brushstrokes, in clear sign of defiance. The work's technique as much as its suggestive title highlights Santhosh's desire to uncover the concealed truths of war and terrorism and foreground the notion that everycoin has two sides, every sword two edges.
"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 painting and its linguistic concerns, which dealt with a world as seen through the images of metaphores, my recent works deals with the kind of devised 'glimpses' of much larger, unresolved stories of immediate happenings."
(T.V. Santhosh, quoted in the press release for false Promises, Grosvernor Gallery, London,2005)