Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Prasanta Sahu’s art practice

Prasanta Sahu as an artist has always tried to investigate relationships and transformations between the self and the world as he perceives it, through his paintings. It’s a survey into the human existence, with his own body serving as the most simplest and complex of subjects.

He reveals: “For me the human body is the most familiar two dimensional image by which I can express unspoken feelings, pain etc. It is an important part of my art making to be aware of the cultural environs and socio-economic climate. As an artist brutality, mindless violence, carnage arouses in me strong vehemence and protest; as to how this is expressed in art is a highly personal choice.”

His paintings often seem like mechanical reproductions. According to him, at every level in his working process, there’s a constant play between opposites. The image is painted very painstakingly using paint-brush technique which is time-consuming. Yet, he deliberately aims to erase any sign of human touch in the final painting.

The artist tries to create a tension, a pull between two opposite factors- that of mechanical reproduction and manual rendering.. In his recent series ‘human skin’ was in focus. He stated: “We are all quite familiar with the human preoccupation with skin, and its connection to obsessions with youth, beauty, age and race. The underlying socio-political issues are universal and yet very personal. Metaphorically it is a disguise, a skin glove, a mask.

"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, transforming it a floating mass of strokes. In the process the animated quality of the human body is transformed into a dead, inanimate surface. “

As Prasanta Sahu puts it, this is representative of the “arranged” second hand violence which we confront every day via the media, viewed clinically from the comforts of our known space.

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