Important Notice

“T.V. Santhosh belongs to a generation that must ask urgent questions of history, if it is to survive a period intent on crushing the dissident spirit of inquiry and resistance. His works are a striking materialization of re-invigorated and vigilant history representations, which have emerged as one of the dominant genres of contemporary Indian art in recent years” (Countdown, The Guild and Nature Morte online press release, www.naturemorte.com,... “T.V. Santhosh belongs to a generation that must ask urgent questions of history, if it is to survive a period intent on crushing the dissident spirit of inquiry and resistance. His works are a striking materialization of re-invigorated and vigilant history representations, which have emerged as one of the dominant genres of contemporary Indian art in recent years” (Countdown, The Guild and Nature Morte online press release, www.naturemorte.com, accessed May 2010).

In the present lot, Santhosh paints the striking image of a wounded lady, the bandage on her head the same bright orange as the sparks that are showering down around her. Titled ‘Scars, Scars, Scars!’, this large and vivid canvas illuminates and problematizes the pervasive nature of violence in contemporary society. The artist notes that his recent work is “…not just about terrorism that comes out of religious fundamentalism. It is about the violence terrorism unleashes and the counter measures the state employs which actually is more violence. At the end of the day, it is innocent people and the ordinary citizens who are sacrificed. So my work is more of a critique and I am not trying to provide any answers to the question of violence” (as quoted in “Interview – 2007: T.V. Santhosh with Baiju Parthan”, Unresolved Stories, the Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2008, p. 16, 17).

In addition to the media derived images that he adopts and manipulates, Santhosh's palette and technique also sharpen the focus of his canvases on globalized violence, technology and extremism. “This distinctive stylistic treatment, which makes Santhosh's paintings recognizable without being predictable, subsumes an incremental transfiguration of material, by degree and detail, which makes it all the more shocking for its unobtrusiveness. It is this mysterious undertone, which prevents Santhosh's works from being generic. As global elegies, annotations to an era of epic-scale turbulence, his works are incomparably more resonant than reportage. While they share the same subject matter, the treatment of his works elevates them beyond limitations. Santhosh distances us from everydayness by characterizing the present with means of a stylistic treatment that plays up instabilities in his subject matter, accentuates the dramatic potential, amplifies the portentous charge of the events he describes and dreams of, thus invoking the unanticipated at the heart of the apparent” (Countdown, The Guild and Nature Morte online press release, www.naturemorte.com, accessed May 2010).

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