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Entering into Santosh More’s canvas resembles walking into a page from the classic Nineteen Eighty-Four (also titled 1984). Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell, wrote a futuristic novel that struck a chill into the heart of capitalists the world over. Orwell’s nightmarish narrative was a scathing critique of the governments control and surveillance of the populace. He questioned the Big Brother approach where the eye of the government was constantly watching, even through the walls of the miserable tenement block flats that the workers inhabited.
Santosh’s approach is perhaps less nightmarish, rather it is a prosaic pondering of the after effects of the capitalized, global world. Here uniformity indicates monotony that has crept into architectural creativity. Row upon row of identical houses crowd the canvas. The streets appear as empty as the houses, with not a soul in sight—this ghost town is not a figment of the artist’s imagination since his inspiration comes from reality.
Yet Santosh More’s world is surreal and the town a creation of his imagination. The houses first resemble naïvely constructed drawings that one rendered as a child, however on closer inspection they reveal a complexity and a plasticity that lends the images a three-dimensionality that may escape the viewer at first viewing.
Each row of houses are not very different from the other and yet, each for the hopes and dreams of an individual or family.
Known for his arabesque, mostly flat and decorative works, Santosh takes a sharp turn towards work that is distinctly different with this new body of paintings, line drawings and animation. Shorn from fussy detailing, the minimalist rendering of the houses, set against flat colour fields of red, evoke powerful feelings of enigma and discomfort. In some frames they may appear like doll houses, or an aerial image of the city that is familiar to frequent flyers.
Another view is a close-up, a dissection where walls develop a plastic quality and swell out to reveal the empty interiors, a quality that is enhanced in the artist’s animated video series.
Santosh was born in a small province in Maharastra, a village that he revisits to stay in touch with his roots. Perhaps it is this shuttling between urbanity and the rural sharpens his vision and brings certain issues into clear focus. Santosh is acutely aware that industry has made even commodities of culture and heritage, which is why some villages are being ‘preserved’ for their quaint and antiquated qualities. Urbanity is not encouraged, even if that means cutting back on basic amenities. The stunting of growth in villages and the acceleration of growth in cities, naturally leads to polarities and the widening of the rural urban divide. Santosh stands between these chasms measuring his space between the world he lives in now and the world that he once knew to be his home town.
Georgina Maddox
October 2008 Mumbai
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PRIVATE SPACES ...
Mumbai has been the hub of abstract painters. Their practice is like a parallel river flowing with the excess of figuration. The many fellow travelers support the journey of another way of looking. The collective learns from each other and evolve a distinctive style that gives them a vocabulary and an identity that defines this journey. It is a spiritual yatra from the terrestrial, an inward journey or a meditative Mantra of self absorption. A private getaway from the humdrum of the urban chaos, into silence and solitude. Into monologues with colors, gestures and canvas. With in this paradigm it has the danger of being a self absorbed aesthetic; exercise without an edge.
Santosh more has been persistently exploring abstraction for many years. He has achieved a consistency with skill to look at the world in layers of planes, perforations and urban hieroglyphs. An aesthetic that liberated the artist from representing the overbearing reality. By moving away from objective meaning into another zone of Abstraction.
His personal journey from the rural to the urban has had an undeniable impression on his visual language. It is a journey that has defined many in contemporary Indian art. Young artist like Santosh will retain the memory of nature; like a forgotten pressed leaf between pages of a diary. The memory of holding butterflies and smearing its powdery wing on one’s forehead ; or collecting snails to watch their silvery trails. These are the small pleasures that speak about fragile feelings and encounters with nature that are engrained with artists. Most of them are lost in the urban landscape and are quite often recollected in tranquility. His early preoccupation with motifs of organic forms resemble whorls, tendrils, butterfly wings.
He employs the play of surface with depth and uses lines,planes and colors to experience space. By focusing on one element to the next, he creates and absorbing detail of fragments of nature. He creates and evokes a consciousness to forms and energies of primordial nature. His alma mater J.J.School nurtured abstraction as visual language and a formula to emulate. The institute has advocated an aesthetic that influenced many youngsters.
The current body of work has evolved from the urban landscape. The artist encounters the harsh urban realities, much of it is defined by architecture and the obsession with a modernist aesthetic of less is more. It is part of the larger agenda of globalization.
"The city has its order and the village its custom"
-Javanese proverb.
This is the order that represents the fears and anxiety of the city, the new metropolitan that will define the country. The new order is a uniform ideology to transform custom into order. Santosh deals with this new order and aesthetic that has emerged in our cities. It believes in clean lines and private spaces that resemble stage settings. Private spaces that are island of aesthetic refinement, a self obsessed and egoistic sacred real estate. He defines the inner spaces of the privileged; these are the spaces that will enact private dramas that define the outside world. These are spaces of power and authority.
The interiors unfold into multiple spaces- openings, enclosures, stairways that lead to basements. They are all lit with dramatis precision of a theatre set, the light and shades enhance the magic and mystery of these sleek interiors. The actors wait in the wings for the cue from the artist/director. The interiors become an active site and unfold into multiple spaces and openings, He identifies with the interior space he desires and does not belong, it echoes of an essential loneliness that persists in empty homes and uninhabited theater settings. There is this pregnant tension that prevails, the air is thick and can be sliced. His palette renders the harsh atmospheric spaces with concealed lighting. His computer aided vocabulary opens up opportunities for exploring cyberspaces and multiple realties. From this private architectural setting he is bound to open a new window. Santosh explores the possibilities and limitations of technology, opening up alternative forms of exploring architecture in an endless play-Lila. The artist has been renewing himself with in his limitations; the formal innovation responds to the times as we wait in the wings for his next performance.
SURESH JAYARAM
Chitrakala Parishath, Bangalore.
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Santosh More practices a somber surrealism, his images by the wings of time. In his juxtapositions of organic and mechanical forms, we sense the uncertainty of public events as well as that select history of anguish marks the soul’s passage.
In these new paintings, More addresses a theme that has long preoccupied him: in his earlier series of large symbolic works, titled Brahma, he had pursued analogies with music in a curiously soundless manner. Then as now, he wove piebald patterns around wave fronts, punctuated rivers of chevrons with dot matrix arrays. Be carefully orchestrating an arpeggio of scales and rifts, More ensured that the look of the painting became its sound.
That soundless music-which exponents of kundalini yoga would doubtless term the- anahata nada, the unsounded sound that booms out during an enlightenment experience – undulates through these flytrap flowers, these wrecked instrument panels that seem to have survived a cosmic catastrophe. We are assailed by question, what fate brought these objects into a common uproar, struck them down? Gradually, a dystopic myth of decadence and chaos begins to propose itself: are we, perhaps, being told an oblique story of nuclear devastation, of tyrants and demons that used their lethal weaoons to choke off the air and water, and fire?
And yet, like the head of Orpheus, which continued to sing down the river offer he had been beheaded, the hymn of art does succumb to tyranny: it constitutes a liberation by itself, a coded narrative of emancipation that shapes humanity’s view of itself, through lament and fable. Working as he does with rich, melancholy colors, Santosh More suggests the textures of vellum, bark and stone: although he takes the transience of life and form for his theme, he renders it through the serenely crafted idiom of immortality.
Ranjit Hoskote
Mumbai: Autumn, 1996
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