The Last Command
Between unhinged fits and hallucinations, he told his story, mumbling… but most of the time he used to lie there with wide-open eyes, unresponsive, sometimes running for cover under a bed and screaming whenever there was loud noise. When finally he knew enough to recollect bloody faces of atrocities, he slowly came out of his daze, but without an identity of a country for which he submitted his life, without a memory of his wife who was expecting a baby and even without a name. But he still heard absurd descriptions spoken of the battles, orders given frequently and the last commands given, followed by deep silence. He still knew that something terrible was happening somewhere, yet could not endure the feeling of being helpless to intervene or stop it from happening. What he experienced could not be traced to any place or time, nor was there any question about the reality of the chain of events, causes, nor its ill-driven agendas. When facing the brutality of war and especially when he felt compelling evidence of such brutality within himself, images of burning flesh, mutilated images of wriggling limbs of death…it was all too real for him and fathomless. That was it! What he mumbled lay there scattered around like broken glass with sharp edges dripping blood…

Going through a bedridden soldier's feverish mumblings who does not even manage to remember his own name, or his country, or the cherished memories of his beloved, one has to wonder: is this a befitting example of a world we are trying to achieve through the war of nations under the pretext of all kinds of unconvincing reasons? There are many kinds of wars, some treacherous and some absurdly blind. Then there is poor man's war and rich nation's war. A whole world of paradox exists at the thin line between the resistance and attack. When will this world get rid of these wars? My learned friend gave me simple answers - until there are no more human discriminations, oppressions and crooked foreign policies. Yes, but why are not such simple answers simple solutions? Are utopias mere utopias? Is humanity destined to suffer by the brutality of some who want to enjoy the world at the cost of others until those commands would be followed by a deep shrill of silence, turning this land into a barren wasteland of live landmines?

My recent works are about how the media presents the world to us and how the media has the power and the means to reconstruct as well as manipulate our understanding of reality. It is about a strange world vulnerable to manipulation. A world where one brands someone as one's enemy, loots them, and then destroys their nation and culture - justifying the massacre of innocents in the name of religion and nation, creating psychosis so that one can do one's brisk real estate and weapons business. My works are specifically an investigation into media generated world itself.

T.V. Santhosh presents his new body of work 'Burning Flags' at Aicon Gallery, London in collaboration with The Guild Gallery of Mumbai and New York. 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?

Similarly Santhosh sculptures, two of which are presented in the show, gesture towards destruction and waste. Each uses scrolling neon messages set in what seem torture or imprisonment cells rendered in white. The use of the neutral medium of white fiberglass directs the pieces towards Hannah Arendt's coining of the phrase "the banality of evil" to convey that most atrocities are committed by ordinary people rather than sociopaths. This sense of everyday atrocities is developed in Santhosh's watercolours which with their black and white depictions of individuals, seem a deliberately quieter counter-point to his paintings. Evil is both banal and widespread in a world where as Santhosh points out in his text above, utopias seem as distant as they ever have been. Santhosh's works invite us to consider the dark side of globalization - the conquests and the wars that have always been fought in the name of religion, nation or progress.

Born in Kerala, T.V.Santhosh earned his B.F.A. from Kalabhavan, Santiniketan, West Bengal, and his M.F.A. in Sculpture, from M.S.U, Baroda. Santhosh has exhibited his work at numerous international art galleries and museums. Prominent museum shows include '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; 'Aftershock, Sainsbury Centre, Contemporary Art Norwich, England, 2007; 'Continuity and Transformation' promoted by Provincia di Milano, Italy, 2007, 'GSK Contemporary' at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK, 2008 and 'The Empire Strikes Back' at the Saatchi Gallery, London, UK, 2010.