An artist who seeks inspiration from street life and advertisements

Here is an insightful statement by artist Subha Ghosh that accompanies his new series of works at Indar Pasricha Contemporary Arts, London:

“There is a certain relationship of my present work and the urban Indian art of billboard painting. Although due to the advent of cheap large scale technology the art of hand painted hoardings have almost died out but in a few pockets in cities like Chennai, Mumbai and smaller Indian towns and mofussils.

My work, for quite some time, has found inspiration in forms of street life and advertisements, like cut out figures and billboard hoardings. The cutout figure like the famous Air India Maharaja or the Kodak cutouts at the Kodak shops created a kind of dislocation of reality for me. But it was not a complete alienation but a reconnection with reality at a different level.

The cutout has become a vehicle for me to transport populations to different localities and diverse societies. It also helps me to look at the social fabric today. After all what is our social structure? What relationships are we building up within our society? I do not believe in concrete structures like the state and religion.

They are both artificial entities. In reality there are no marked boundaries it is a palimpsest. Perhaps it is on the fluid borders of these categories and moving populations, with their aspirations and expectations and desires that I want to place my figures in, not just as witnesses, but as infiltrators.

The billboards for me always had a fascination in the arbitrariness of their composition and the place they have found in embodying a political message within our consciousness. The emancipation of composition from known notions of artistic composition is refreshing. Scale is because of the importance of the protagonist within the narrative of the picture or in the social context they are situated in and not in any perspective logic. I have been fascinated by the political implications of scale in our social thinking and its physical manifestations.

What happens if that very idea of the scale is subverted? If surreptitiously, we replace the mythological personality by a very ordinary person. Does he or she acquire a mythical status? Is the class structure that these billboards seem to reflect subverted? The other aspect that I find myself looking at is the grand gesture for a grand narrative.

This is where I find the art of billboard painting crossing over into the grand narrative of renaissance painting. In my work I am trying to locate myself in that fold of the grand gesture of the renaissance painting and Indian billboard painter."