BV Suresh

B.V. Suresh first moved away from a predominantly painterly language in the late nineties, shifting to mixed media assemblages held together within a framework resembling domestic furniture. Preetha Nair, who worked on the text for one of his exhibition catalogues, describes her excitement: "Getting used to some of that indefinable darkness that pervades them, eyes shifting, searching and resting only briefly, moving from one form to the next mark, from a bunch of cherries to a golden egg, the saffron bait, a hand grenade, miles of rope, embroidered forms, holes, crevices, a virginal sewing-machine...". 


The personal and the confessional had always characterized his work, even as a student in Baroda, when the overtones of the kind of language used by the British painter R.B. Kitaj, widely discussed at the time, was very much in evidence. A subtle shift had occurred within this larger concern while studying in London. The immediacy of the day to day which had earlier served as a focal point of reference seemed "too foreign and too superficial" to actually move him deeply and. the only meaningful source seemed to be the universality which binds the experience of suffering, transcending as it did geographical and cultural constraints. Whether it was the slaughter of contaminated reindeer in Norway or the rise of fundamentalism in India, it affected the innocent and culpable alike. Working with dense overlapping layers of paint, he created vast ambiguous areas which could accommodate the personal within the more definable configuration of the event in question, the latter conveyed through the use of recognizable symbols. 

Free-standing or hung, his work bears the familiar premonition of oppression and guilt: the viewer becomes one more component, frozen in passivity and an unwilling partner to crime; "not allowed the release or the glory of martyrdom, but only the eternal pain of the weight." 

In his more recent works, whether digital prints, video, or painting, Suresh offers a nuanced exploration of some of the key issues that confront us today, most prominently, the growing culture of communalism and violence we are faced with. Through these works, the artist questions history and its modes of narration, and also, the circulation of images engendered by mass media. 

As Baroda based critic, Deeptha Achar, explains in one of the artist's recent exhibition catalogues, "One can see how Suresh’s artwork is demonstrably located within the arena of public debate. Its interventional status allows the material composition of his artworks to be located in a complex field of arguments that sets up and deploys its ideologically loaded significance in a manner that modulates and inflects competing meanings. In such a situation, the work cannot be construed as the mere expression of an artist’s meanings, nor can the intentions of the artist be the final arbiter of its meaning. Insofar as the artist professes or claims the work, he gets positioned as a public intellectual intervening through and across the unstable meanings proposed by the artwork. The artist who offers commentary from within a given context, however, must be distinguished from the modernist conception of the vanguard where the artist is positioned before and ahead of a society mired in convention."

(Profile by Saffronart)