TV Santhosh pulls at the omnipresent threads of oppression and violence found in today’s visual culture through his toxically bright canvases. Using photorealism to distort and dissect newspaper and television journalism, he reverses black and white images into their negative, infecting them with hot pinks and lime greens to create acidic and surreal imagery. Conscious of current events and the inexorable presence of war and political tumult, Santhosh expertly isolates those images which represent the clash of the old and new, sane and insane or free and oppressed to show both his distrust of media and our general desensitization to the imagery. Sathosh often subverts the iconography of the individual in place of a more archetypal figure, emblematic of universal, not personal, travesties. Speaking on his technique the artist states, “Negative images evoke the inverse aspects of the phenomena. As certain elements get deleted and become unrecognizable, they reveal an event’s hidden implications. In the process, the elements of ‘local’ lose their specificity, attaining instead a universal significance and vice versa.” (T.V. Santhosh, False Promises, London, 2005.)