Prasanta Sahu’s paintings map and survey the core of human existence

An upcoming and talented artist from India, Prasanta Sahu, marries two opposing ideas: the unique brushstroke and the reproduced image. He is acutely aware of the pictorial surface of the canvas. In them, monochromatic pictures are calculatively and captivatingly contrasted with vividly painted areas and apparent abrasions on the canvas create tempting textural motifs.

However, his work consciously looks to move away from the high-modernist obsession with the painted surface’s formal properties. He essentially strives to fathom complex relationship and transformations occurring between the self and the world as he perceives it. His paintings act as a mapping and surveying of the human existence.

For Prasanta Sahu, the human body is the most familiar two-dimensional image for expressing latent feelings. Acutely aware of the cultural environs and socio-economic climate, mindless violence and brutality arouse a sense of strong vehemence and protest in him that he expresses in his art. It’s one of the most important aspects of his practice.

He elaborates in an interview: “The studio is the Operation Theatre where I cut, treat, arrange & re-arrange images of human skins & human figures. A tiny square inch of human skin is enlarged multiple times, converting it into a floating mass of strokes. In the process the animated quality of the human body gets transformed into a dead, inanimate surface. To my mind this is representative of the ‘arranged’ second hand violence we confront every day via the media, viewed clinically from the comforts of our known space.”

At every level of his curious and equally meticulous working process, there tends to be a constant interplay of opposites. The image is painted in a painstaking manner using the paint-brush technique - both tedious and time consuming - yet, he deliberately aims to erase any apparent signs of human intervention in the final output.

The artist essentially tries to build a feel of tension, a sort of pull between two opposing elements – those of manual rendering and mechanical reproduction. Thus the work creates an element of doubt in the viewers’ mind, whether what they are looking at, is a painting, or a reproduction on the canvas.