T.V. Santhosh - BRIC London Thursday, April 14, 2011 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Private Collection, New Delhi

  • Catalogue Essay

    A Santhosh canvas is easily distinguishable. Most of them look like photographic negatives where specific details of a face or an object have been largely erased. What remains is the basic structure or outline – reminiscent of the works of the renowned American painter-photographer Man Ray. As the details get deleted, the event’s hidden implications surface; the local loses its specificity, making way for the universal to come to the fore.
     
    In Your Terrorist, Our Freedom Fighter, he paints the same man twice, side by side, his face covered by a cloth and hands above the head, surrendering to his captors. The two figures receive different treatment – one has deep hues of green and red; the other is lost, almost distorted, in a mix of neon green and pink. The work questions the ambiguities inherent in notions of right and wrong, enemy and victim, evil and innocent: ambiguities that the media tends to paper over. Irony is integral to Santhosh’s dialectic. “It is the only way to deal with the unresolved
    nature of the happenings around the world today,” he says.
     
    (Sanjukta Sharma, ‘The art of war’)

16

Your Terrorist, Our Freedom Fighter

2004
Diptych: oil on canvas.
152.5 x 244 cm (60 x 96 in).
Signed ‘TV Santhosh’ on the reverse of each panel.

Estimate
£100,000 - 150,000 

Sold for £109,250

BRIC

14 - 15 April 2011
London