Prominent artist T.V. Santhosh requires little introduction having seen much success over the last decade featuring in a number of key exhibitions and collections, including 'India Xianzai' Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China, 2009; 'Passage to India, Parts I and II New Indian Art from the Frank Cohen Collection', at Initial Access, Wolverhampton, UK, 2008 and 2009; 'GSK Contemporary' at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK, 2008 and 'The Empire Strikes Back' at the Saatchi Gallery, London, UK, 2010 amongst many.
Aicon Gallery presents his eagerly-awaited new body of work 'Burning Flags'. A suite of paintings are rendered in the burning green, orange, yellow and red hues that Santhosh has become known for. In all of the paintings we see a close-up of a figure staring back at the viewer, dominating the foreground but also enmeshed in the background which details which jag in and out of view. Each painting is mired in the chaos of war, a snatched moment heightened by the solarised colour scheme. Santhosh's images are taken from media coverage of terrorism and war - and it has been much commented how his deliberate referencing of photographic negatives both comment on the mediation of such events through the media (recalling Baudrillard's now infamous comment about the Gulf War) but also produce the drama of The Situations which he is depicting. The works are hallucinatory - what is it exactly that is being witnessed by both the protagonists of the paintings and us the viewers who look at them?Videos