Spotlight on seven upcoming Indian contemporary artists

The seven artists namely, Aditi Pande, Dibin Tilakan, Saju Kunhan, Sudheesh K, Sujil, Sujith KS and Vinod Balak, who feature in a new group show at Kochi based Chaithanya Art Gallery belong to the category of the young Indian contemporary artists. Their local affiliations and global understandings play a very pivotal role in establishing their identities as 'contemporary artists'.

For Saju Kunhan, as curator of the show JohnyML explains, these implosions are the most important outcome of the life changing incidents across the world. Taking the city of Mumbai as a case study or as an aesthetic image, even without highlighting the landmarks for identification, Saju Kunhan portrays 'a city' as a 'cold blast'. It does not hurt instead it allures the mind with the beauty of the blast. However, for the artist, this blast is cold because the heat of it has already created a series of implosions.

K.Sudheesh tells the viewer a different story; an extremely provincial and local one and with the artistic freedom to oscillate between different worlds, he connects it with the contemporary global realities. By de-layering the society like a clinician, he arranges different layers that he has extracted in a folk perspective. He produces the criticality of this particular society, which is spectacular in its own ways, for a moment detaching himself from it.

Known for his strongly colored and magnificently peopled surreal worlds, Sujith KS, in the present series has taken a different approach to deal with the internal turmoil of a thinking individual living in the midst of social spectacles. With an enlightened awareness about nature and the current debates on the depletion of environment, he intervenes in this discourse through a different visual mode, or to put it in different words, through a different voice.

The artist does not lament on the forests that we have cut down. He does not speak of the rivers that have gone dry. Instead, he paints a landscape which is possible if human beings aspire to make them a reality. These are sustainable models of landscapes mingled with a sort of religious reference.