With his formal training in printmaking, Shibu Natesan`s “canvases are filled with blocks of bright colour like the glossy pages of a magazine and distracting details are stripped down to the minimum. Indeed, the precision of his technique, combined with the appropriation of images gathered from popular culture, lulls the viewer into a sense of the familiar, the recognised and the emotionally detached” (Anne Fleetwood, Shibu...
With his formal training in printmaking, Shibu Natesan`s “canvases are filled with blocks of bright colour like the glossy pages of a magazine and distracting details are stripped down to the minimum. Indeed, the precision of his technique, combined with the appropriation of images gathered from popular culture, lulls the viewer into a sense of the familiar, the recognised and the emotionally detached” (Anne Fleetwood, Shibu Natesan: Vision Unlimited, Grosvenor Gallery, 2005). But these are only initial perceptions – Natesan is always striving to challenge the comfort of recognition his viewers feel by bringing a touch of the impossible and the inspired into his portrayals of reality.
Following in the footsteps of his 2004 Existence of Instinct series, this 2005 work on linen juxtaposes images of wild creatures with those of the man made world – in this piece, a young boy and his mother inch away from sharks in an aquarium. Here, the sense of security and the familiar that his works inspire in viewers is fleeting at best, leaving them asking that chronic and daunting question – What if…? What if those sharks behind the plate glass of their aquarium tanks were free? What if humans, so diminutive in comparison to these magnificent creatures, had not encaged them for their own entertainment? What if little children, seeing these hunters safely behind glass, eventually forget about the fine system of ecological co-dependence on which our planet operates? Once they begin, such questions never end, and in this introspection Natesan has achieved his objective – helping each of his viewers widen the horizons of the possible and the real in their lives.