T.V. Santhosh lifts pivotal episodes from recent history and renegotiates their appearance with a shock-bulb of violent energy that eclipses the work. His paintings employ the themes of war and global terrorism. Santhosh was born in 1968 in Kerala. He completed his Bachelor’s degree in fine art, specializing in sculpture, from Kalabhavan, Santiniketan, in 1994. He then studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts of M.S. University, Baroda, completing his Master’s degree there in 1997.
Heavily inspired by cinema, news media, art history and popular culture, Santhosh’s art is centered on the exploration of the present day crisis. He uses images from print media, television and the internet to create eerily realistic canvases replete with meaning that make strong statements about the general socio-political situation in India.
Santhosh’s distinctive stylistic treatment, which makes his paintings recognizable without being predictable. It subsumes three cardinal elements: first, a mode of representation that has erroneously been termed as photo-realism; second, a strict turning of chromatic scale; and third, an incremental transfiguration of the material, by degree and detail, that is all the more shocking for its unobtrusiveness.
