Lot 47: - T.V. Santhosh b. 1968 , In God's Name oil on canvas

signed, titled and dated 2003 on the reverse oil on canvas

measurements 119.4 by 179.1 cm. alternate measurements 47 by 70 1/2 in.

PROPERTY OF A LADY
T V Santosh began his studies at a college in Trichur Kerala, Southern India at this early stage in his career he was influenced by the spiritual in art and yet was an activist 'I was active with this particular political group, participating in street theatre, processions, sloganeering, pasting posters...so there were two extreme thought processes going on. I was concerned with looking at social aspects from both a 'curative' and 'resistance-oriented' approach; there was a strong disbelief in practice that concentrated on pure aesthetic approach.' This activist mentality has remained with Santhosh and has influenced his work throughout his career. In God's Name (Lot 47), 2003 was exhibited in Mumbai as part of Santhosh's first ever solo exhibition. The 14 oils from the exhibition presented the artist's vision of the crises that beset the globalised present. Although work from this period has been termed by critics as photo-realist, hyper-realist would be a more accurate description for he has quietly altered images so that they take on elements of the familiar mixed with mystery. 'Santhosh's visuality, ostensibly based on the photographic, is in fact far more akin to the cinematic.' The almost monochromatic palette that the artist uses in this series is intentionally reminiscent of black and white cinema, to which he frequently makes reference. "His narratives, in which he translates current events, are too allegorical to be history, yet too mutable to be myth. In common with many of his contemporaries, Santhosh works with the pictorial readymades of expressive culture, drawing his source materials from magazines and television, but also from art history and world cinema. His pattern of selection is determined, however, by the key themes of war and catastrophe: his art is attentive to the specific idioms of contemporary global conflict, to the diabolical pact between knowledge and terror, the skewed antagonism between puissant globality and weakened locality. We enter his narratives midway into the action: formally, these paintings focus on a moment of crisis or a sudden manifestation, a figurative focal image that is often bordered by a margin of blur, an abstract passage suggestive of cosmic radiation, microbiological skeins, or a close-up view of fabric or flesh.' (Ranjit Hoskote, The Hindu Online Review of One Hand Clapping/Siren, 2003) The series focused on the artist's preoccupation with the distortion of science and technology into monstrous tools of destruction, the laboratory and the battlefield become the venues for his paintings. 'As global elegies, annotations to an era of epic-scale turbulence, cryptic speculations on a clouded future, these paintings are incomparably more resonant than reportage; while they share in its subject matter, their treatment elevates them beyond the limitations of the front page. Reportage, even of upheaval, moors us in a constant present: the sheer everydayness of its form normalises the elusive or epochal nature of its content. By contrast, Santhosh distances us from everydayness: his stylistic treatment plays up instabilities in the present, amplifies the portentous and dramatic charge of the events he describes and dreams of, thus invoking the unanticipated at the heart of the apparent.' (ibid) It is unclear whether the protagonists of 'In God's Name' are soldiers, besieged guerilla armies or condemned prisoners yet the artist has deified them with haloes around their heads, in homage to Giotto, a mystical light shining from the mountains behind. As the title suggests the artist questions the justification of global terror and acts of war in the name of God. 'Death and redemption are linked, in Santhosh's universe, by means of the transfigurations that he enacts, his references and devices, which push his concretely visualised figures up against the abstractionist margin of blur. Beneath the cool finesse of the surfaces, the oblique wit and low-key rhetoric, lies an impassioned sensibility. It is manifested in his troubled, interrogative attitude towards war, his awareness that science unbridled by compassion is folly, and the relentless desire for knowledge a pathology.' (ibid)