B.V Suresh

B.V. Suresh 
Flashe color on paper 
Untitled 
The personal and the confessional had always characterized his work, even as a student in Baroda, when the overtones of the kind of language used by the British painter R.B. Kitaj, widely discussed at the time, was very much in evidence. A subtle shift had occurred within this larger concern while studying in London. The immediacy of the day to day which had earlier served as a focal point of reference seemed “too foreign and too superficial” to actually move him deeply and. the only meaningful source seemed to be the universality which binds the experience of suffering, transcending as it did geographical and cultural constraints. Whether it was the slaughter of contaminated reindeer in Norway or the rise of fundamentalism in India, it affected the innocent and culpable alike. Working with dense overlapping layers of paint, he created vast ambiguous areas which could accommodate the personal within the more definable configuration of the event in question, the latter conveyed through the use of recognizable symbols. 

Free-standing or hung, his work bears the familiar premonition of oppression and guilt: the viewer becomes one more component, frozen in passivity and an unwilling partner to crime; “not allowed the release or the glory of martyrdom, but only the eternal pain of the weight.”