"A central part of my painting practice involves the quest for a resonant image that refuses to be read directly, one that obliges the viewer to make an interpretation…I am concerned with political events and figures from world history that can, through visual exploration, be read as both a questioning of India’s national issues as well as addressing our global situation." (Back to the Future1989-2005, Gallery Espace, New Delhi,...
"A central part of my painting practice involves the quest for a resonant image that refuses to be read directly, one that obliges the viewer to make an interpretation…I am concerned with political events and figures from world history that can, through visual exploration, be read as both a questioning of India’s national issues as well as addressing our global situation." (Back to the Future1989-2005, Gallery Espace, New Delhi, 2006)
This work on paper is partially based on a seventeenth century Mogul drawing of Inyat Khan on his deathbed. Inyat Khan, portrayed here by Natesan as gaunt and ageing, was a seventeenth century poet and friend of the Emperor Jehangir, in whose memoirs it has been recorded that even the best artists of the time failed to depict the dying man’s true condition. It is this context and its elusive moment that Natesan pushes the viewer to engage in.
"Shibu’s treatment is only deceptively related to photorealism; in fact, it is not an extension of photography, but a crisp departure from it. He distorts the detail, flattens the depth of field, and employs the harshness of light and extent of shadow to pare down a figure or extend an object into indefinable nuance. This is why, although Shibu’s paintings originate in magazine photographs, they gain a riddle-like, inexplicable quietness more often associated with the paintings of such masters of the enigmatic situation as Pierro della Francesca, Vermeer and Seurat." (Alchemy: Works on Canvas & Paper, Jehangir Art Gallery and Art Musings Gallery, Mumbai, 2005)