T.V. Santhosh

Good overall condition. Colors of original brighter with greater tonal variations from catalogue illustration.
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T. V. Santhosh has adopted a unique and striking painting technique that makes his work instantaneously recognisable.  Choosing photographic imagery as his base, he solarizes or reverses the images creating works that conjure the style of an x-ray or film negative. He frequently confronts issues of violence and injustice both today and throughout history in his 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 by appropriating references from such sources as magazines, newspapers and television. The influence of print media is reflected in the photographic quality of his works, both in their clarity and composition.

In his large scale paintings, Santhosh places his viewer at the center of the action, as though the audience is looking through the lens of a journalist's camera. '...One looks at the world through tinted spectacles of 'news reports,' that unroll the stories of massacre of innocents, spectacular highlights of explosions, flux of faces of people who make headlines, spitting the words of hate and arrogance and the kinds of propaganda campaigns that just struggle to hide nothing but truth. It is a strange world exposed and manipulated. A world where one does not know who the real enemy is, yet 'terror' is the common word for both those who resist and those who attack. It is one's extended vision that construct and reshapes the perceptions of the 'present.' And it is riddled with a number of eternal questions and a couple of ready-made yet elusive solutions, which I am interested with. It is the touch and smell of the 'present' I am dealing with in my works, in a process to find a solution, where the praxis of language becomes one with the perceptions of reality.' (T V Santhosh - False Promises, exhibition catalogue, Grosvenor Gallery, London, November -December 2005).

'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 deals with the kind of devised 'glimpses' of a much larger, unresolved stories of immediate happenings...' (T V Santhosh - False Promises, exhibition catalogue, Grosvenor Gallery, London, November -December 2005).