Inflections of Delight

An artist like Santosh discards the outward appearances of nature, not as material for observation but as an idiom of expression. He needs nature and cannot divorce himself from it. But he can pierce the outward in search of the inward life. At its base are still the varied patterns of unfolding life, in flowers, plants, grasses; the texture of the stones, shells, bark; the sound and movement of water and of bird and insect life; the subtle inflection of cloud and mist and the changing sky are still the sources of his delight.Many in these days of abstraction believe they have transformed nature to a still more elevated articulation. Unfortunately, quite a bit of what is described as abstraction is random and inchoate. These artists do not seem to have felt the charm of root reality, that is, of nature on their pulse. I believe Santosh is one of those who has so felt it. What he has succeeded in doing is to give nature a fresh incarnation. He draws out its essence. Here, in his work, it is this we invariably taste with our eager eyes.He has evolved new ways of suggesting the interwoven rhythms by which the visible word is permeated. Thus he does something far more ‘deeply interfused' as binds together the patterns of shell, the thrust and the swell of the sea, the slant of light upon a leaf, the flight of a bird and a feather fall upon a mossy stone. But none of all this is literally so, purely imaginatively.This is well groomed art, which can do more than delight. It can also enlighten. Experiencing works of this chaste order we as if stand at the mid point of a pendulum's swing--a pendulum of experience that swings outward into both the light as the life around us, and inward into ourselves. Resultantly, thanks to it we seek to penetrate and inform ourselves about the reality that lives deep within us. With it's chastity we can certainly live in our own worlds; look upon it and sense it, for it is the stuff of experience that the artist in the viewer, also, seizes upon, and invests with fresh meanings.I do think Santosh's 'abstraction' enriches our vision. It is not a mere escape or sedative. The overly jangled big city nerves will surely calm themselves with the decorum that there is in his compositions
Keshav Malik