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Lot 9

 

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A master of photorealism, Shibu Natesan’s characters and images are an exact rendition of the real, flawlessly finished with his painstaking brushwork and attention to detail. In their entirety, however, the artist’s compositions are quite contrary to the ‘reality’ of their individual subjects, and, rather than naturalistic, appear almost dreamlike with their unusual and even startling juxtapositions. Like his smaller works on paper, Natesan’s... A master of photorealism, Shibu Natesan’s characters and images are an exact rendition of the real, flawlessly finished with his painstaking brushwork and attention to detail. In their entirety, however, the artist’s compositions are quite contrary to the ‘reality’ of their individual subjects, and, rather than naturalistic, appear almost dreamlike with their unusual and even startling juxtapositions. Like his smaller works on paper, Natesan’s large format canvases are often tableaus of disassociated subjects, diverse settings, and a variety of symbols ranging from wild animals to Caribbean reggae artists – combinations that lend his work an air of the surreal.

In the present lot, the artist evokes irony with his portrayal of a lion, the ‘king of the jungle’, bound and strung upside down from its feet, while a mere tortoise wearily makes its way across the floor below. There is an obvious exchange of roles in this work, upsetting the normal power dynamic that the two subjects might share in an unmediated encounter. While the usually swift and viciously carnivorous hunter is rendered incapable, the lack of speed innate to the tortoise has been transformed into a regal ‘approach’.

Natesan’s works are “…rendered tense and evocative through an unexpected elision of symbols. In this way, he challenges the comfort of recognition. Given his painterly facility, Natesan...brings in taut metaphors of physical domination and power structures in a world of moral contestation…The interest…lies in Natesan's obvious painterly skills and his ability to cross reference other histories, other narratives in art, and to bring them within a frame that must remain finally, open-ended.” (Gayatri Sinha, “Talks, Works and Realism”, The Hindu, 4 February, 2005).

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