Jyothi Basu

Jyothi Basu, Recent Works (organized by The Fine Art Resource),  Artists' Centre, Mumbai, 2003

'Jyothi Basu's recent paintings are cast as meditations on the single male figure, bearded and prophet-like, and its relationship to a landscape of surpassing, polymorphous fecundity.  These paintings mark the breaking of a decade-long painterly silence for the 1960-born artist, who was a member of the Radical Group, which briefly revolutionised Indian art practice in the late 1980s.  Dwelling on his work, we realise that it is an interior time-zone and location, developed around perspectives of the personality: the landscapes are landscapes of the self.  The artist takes the eye captive, by means of small differentials of scale and tone that continually alter the dialectical connection between the figure and the backdrop of natural objects portrayed.  Paying intense attention to the practice of picture-making as a puzzle or game, he engages the viewer's energies fully.  If Basu's iconography of redemption moves us deeply, even in this profane age of split-second gratifications and instant cures, it is precisely because he allows for the warm, human tonalities of the sensuous and the ironic, without confining himself to the austerity of transcendence.' (Ranjit Hoskote, Healing Properties: Jyothi Basu's Landscapes of the Self, Mumbai, 2002).