Sharks Eat Meat: February 2013

Thursday, February 14, 2013

DAY 844 - Valentine's Art Review

"Cyber Sensual" Valentine's Day Art Review

by John Coulter

      New Delhi painter and new media artist Satadru Sovan often uses paint to explore self, gender, visual culture, and the digital world. Satadru's sensual, ultraviolet fantasies have been part of the Sharks Eat Meat online art collective since October of 2012.

      The worlds that painter Satadru Sovan envisions appear through infrared thermal-goggles that are focused on meaty men and hearty women. The vibrant color palette that dominates his body of work makes Robert Mapplethorpe's black and whites seem tame. The cut-out, posterized, and hard-edged style of painting alludes to the display of a computer monitor. One recalls an iTunes visualizer more than a 1970's abstract laser show which gives the paintings a distinctively digital quality. It is in this displaced realm that Satadru creates complex contemporary relationships for us to gaze upon.

      Satadru's playful titles present viewers with an enjoyable puzzle to ponder as they make their way through the painting.   His works often reference the emotional, physical, and digital all with a quick rhyme. Mobile text and online lingo add spice to his clever titles.   In "My Quick Embrace Had Deleted All Time and Place" multiple techniques come together to tell a story.   Sophisticatedly using paint in a way that directly references photoshop's digital smudge tool, Satadru blends personal and social spaces smoothly.   Like the marbling of a cheese cake swirl, the result of Satadru's careful techniques is steamier than Men's Vogue.

      In the painting "Chant of the Profiling… Have to be … "Cyber-Chic" " Satadru sets characters adrift in an ambiguous, cyber setting once again. The female protagonist gazes outwards towards the viewer from both her seat and an adjacent mirror. Here the reflected figures have been used to address themes of consciousness, self, and identity in the digital age. Manet and Valezquez played with illusions of perspective and reflections to help viewers psychologically enter their paintings. The flawlessly mirrored elements in "Cyber-Chic" lend a sense of reality to the work and add to its illusion.    Digital photography and an individual's online presence equally form a persons identity today, and Satadru's paintings explore this concept.

      Satadru's paintings of relationships complicated by computers are culturally significant. While Jeff Koons's nude's were as hollow as his sculptures, Satadru's paintings are produced from a genuine interest in post-modern, cyber relationships and culture.   Another artist working with the ingredients cyber, gender, and linguistics is Guillermo Gomez Pena, but he must have a different recipe book because despite these similar themes, their works are quite dissimilar.

   I encourage you to follow and support the wonderful artist Satadru Sovan.