An artist who analyzes our preoccupation with skin, the mechanical processes and the human perception

In one of his critically acclaimed series of works, entitled ‘Human Skin’, Prasanta Sahu highlighted the preoccupation with skin, and resultant obsessive tendencies defining with beauty, age and race. He had elaborated: “The underlying socio-political issues are universal and yet very personal.

Metaphorically it is a disguise, a skin glove, a mask. My works deal with human body parts. The human skin after all harbors curious undercurrents as a fabricated object. One could argue that he tries to get under the skin of the viewer to perhaps communicate a concept of collective identity.”

A definite act of choice - of opting to view images from behind a database of individualistic experience - lies behind our perception, the artist feels. What we notice gets transformed and influenced by what we believe to know and vice versa. The mechanical tends to subvert the manual and vice versa.

According to him, mechanical interventions have greatly impacted human perception, for instance, watching a print of a human face in a hoarding or examining an enlarged view of small insects in a magazine changes the usual knowledge/ perception/ information processing. It opens up an altogether different realm to our eyes and senses.

Human intervention and interpretation can analyze the world of both macro and micro. An enlarged portion of the skin transforms into a different kind of visual to appear like a piece of fabric or even a geographical map. Breaking into a fluid, floating mass of strokes, it constructs an image within itself, in a close-up view.

Once the photographic image is reworked upon, it may become recognizable. However, it translates into a visual oriented survey record when split through enlargement and magnified on a canvas. It can retain the outer shape even as the finer details are translated into abstract motifs in the process that he terms integrated disintegration.

An intense mind-locking exercise is involved in engaging the self, to paint over all these deft details. The final visual along with the process itself may be treated as a metaphor for the monotony in our day-to-day life, the obsessions faintly related with certain unexposed areas of human mind and also the temporal existence of things, as he puts it.