Elusive Solutions

In his signature style, T.V. Santhosh paints in hallucinogenic greens, reds and purples, recreating the effect of a colour photographic negative to interrogate the themes of war and global terrorism. On his use of the aesthetic of the photographic negative, he explains, "It all started off from a casual observation while working on my computer. While manipulating an image I accidentally inverted the colours and turned it into a negative and was amazed by the transformation, because though everything of the original image is encoded in the negative you cannot recognise the specificities. That was an interesting twist. If you turn the image of an enemy fighter into a negative, all of a sudden you can no longer recognise him though it is still the same image. I found that the negative image acquires some kind of neutrality that makes it travel beyond its local meanings and become something universal." (Artist Statement, N. Adajania and B. Parthan, T.V. Santhosh Unresolved Stories, Mumbai, 2007, p. 16-17)