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Lot Essay
TV Santhosh confronts the inexorable presence of violence and injustice both today and throughout history in his large scale 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, juxtaposing images in his paintings which call into question the authenticity of newspaper and television journalism. Stylistically, Santhosh has adopted a unique and striking painting technique which makes his work instantaneously recognizable. Choosing photographic imagery as his base, he solarizes or reverses the images creating works which conjure the style of an x-ray or film negative.
Speaking on his technique the artists states, "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, exh. cat. Grosvenor Gallery, London, Nov-Dec 2005.)
Speaking on his technique the artists states, "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, exh. cat. Grosvenor Gallery, London, Nov-Dec 2005.)