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Catalog Essays
Catalog Essay by Ranjit Hoskote
Santosh More practises a sombre surrealism, his images shadowed by the wings of time. In his juxtapositions of organic and mechanical forms, we sense the uncertainty of public events as well as that secret history of anguish which 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 Nada Brahma, he had pursued analogies with music in a curiously soundless manner. Then as now, he wove piebald patterns around wavefronts, punctuated rivers of chevrons with dot matrix arrays. By 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 questions: 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 who used their lethal weapons to choke off the air and water, earth and fire?
And yet, like the head of Orpheus, which continued to sing down the river after he had been beheaded, the hymn of art does not 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 colours, 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
Elusive Whorls - Catalog Essay by Madhvi Sardeshpande
Santosh too is fascinated by natural objects and the transient nature of beauty: a butterfly alights, sucks nectar and then is off in flight - all in a trice - in a lovely sequence of visual changes as it folds its wings and unfolds them. This silent flutter of wings of the butterfly, the quiet ripples on the surface of a pond in which a pebble is thrown, the beautiful asymmetry of shells, of veins of leaves - all these fascinate the artist; he is truly in awe of these phenomena.
Santosh says "what has always inspired me, and made me alive to life is 'nature', its continuousness, its characteristics of growth, decay, changing moods, textures, colours and forms; every moment of this wonder that inspires me, moves and touches my inner sensibilities."
Santosh's large canvases are a large field of textured sober colour lit up here, dimmed there, creating a dramatic backdrop for the mysterious forms that inhabit them. These forms are very ambiguous - there are rolls or tubes, then there are scrolls, seemingly of parchment, whose volutes at times merge with the eddies of a whirlpool, stirred by a thin staff. Again, breaking up these strange scrolls is a shadowy, inky form which seems to be transforming its shape; here it looks like the wings of a large butterfly, there like the shadow of a large fallen leaf. Then there are the small hieroglyphics or grids of dots and arrow heads which add movement to the composition and lead the viewer's eye to different parts of the canvas.
Santosh has an ambiguous vision to communicate, but he does it with such a clarity and precision that leads us deeper into the painting - the viewer is compelled to fathom the artist's creation: he cannot ignore it because of its sheer size.
In totality, Santosh's paintings are a search for a language to express poetic feelings for nature- which cannot be accomplished by painting landscapes. Instead he combines the grandeur of medieval Chinese and Japanese landscapes with personally devised formal symbols of the art of the modern technological age that he lives in. To sum up in his own words: “I continue to paint, revealing and mystifying, obscuring things that still evoke the 'lived' experience, and creating the illusion, letting the eye wonder: whether it is what it sees or is it what is represented there."
-Madhavi Sardeshpande
Catalog Essay by Georgina Maddox
THERE lies a little city leagues away.
Its wharves the green sea washes all day long.
Its busy, sun-bright wharves with sailor's song
And clamour of trade ring loud the live-long day.
Into the gappy harbour hastening, gay
With press of snowy canvas, tall ships throng.
The peopled streets to blithe-eyed Peace belong,
Glad housed beneath theses crowding roofs of grey.
'Twas long ago this city prospered so,
For yesterday a woman died therein.
Since when the wharves are idle fallen, I know,
And in the streets is hushed the pleasant din;
The thronging ships have been, the songs have
been;--
since yesterday it is so long ago.
Robert Charles G D
The deserted city
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
Catalog Essay by Suresh Jairam
