VS Blodsow is a self taught artist. He was born in Kerala in 1975
Her Obsession is not my Obsession &‘Nothing to do with Sigmar Polke and Jonathan Monk', The Park Chennai - The Madras Terrace House.
Nomadic Cock speaking Blah Blah, The Madras Terrace House, Chennai
Product Deproduction Product, Hues Art Gallery, Chennai
“Alienation and Reality”- Alliance Francaise de Chandigarh.
“Alienation and Reality”- Alliance Francaise de Pondycherry
“Alienation and Reality”- Alliance Francaise de Madras.
“Alienation and Nature”- Russian Cultural Center,Thiruvananthapuram.
“Hope in the time of Alienation”- IIT, Mumbai.
“Hope in the time of Alienation”- Hacienda Art Gallery, Mumbai.
“Alienation”- Alliance Francaise de Madras
“Down to Earth”- NatureQuest – Book Point, Chennai.
Madras Crocodile Bank Trust (MCBT) Chennai
International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (ICJB) Mumbai
Community Environmental Monitoring (CEM) SIPCOT Cuddalore, Chennai
International Crane Foundation and Nature Quest Chennai
37 Indian Still Lifes – Tasveer Arts
Mumbai - Kolkata - Ahmedabad Bangalore
“Polyphony”- Dravidia Art Gallery, Fort Kochi, Kerala
“Memories” – Durbar hall, Cochin
Fragmented translation - Hues Art Gallery Chennai
Alliance Francaise de madras.
Akar Prakar - ITC Sonar Bangla, Calcutta
Alliance Francaise de Madras
Group Show Amethyst gallery, Chennai
IIT Chennai.
A Group show, Chola Sheration Hotel, Chennai
Annual Exhibition, Cholamandal Artists’ village, Chennai
Small format Bronze sculpture Show, Cholamandal Artists’ village
Group Show of Cholamandal Artists’ in Chola Sheraton Hotel, Chennai
11 young artists from Madras-Palette people Gallary, Cochin
Kerala Kalapeedom, Cochin
Kerala Kalagramam, Mahe
Gallery Azimuth, Strasbourg, France
DC Art Gallery, Kottayam
Vinyasa, Chennai
Cholamandal Artists’ village, Chennai
Strategies of viewership are as much implicit in works of art as strategies of depiction.
Impressionism onwards, many artists have chosen to comment on the epistemology of vision, of seeing. Seeing is an exterior art. But sight is yoked to insight and can, often, be an interior process too.
Blodsow’s canvases inexorably lead you to a conversation between the surreal and the hyper-real. They confront us with the unreason of dazzlement when too much light in the eye, in fact, produces a haze. It is the kind of predicament experienced by someone who stares into the sun – and can see nothing. The spectator here feels he has been hung ‘upside down’.
There is a fusion here of the eye and the sun – an impossible image of a luminescence that can only be blinding and cannot be seen. A dazzling of vision that is evoked through a procession of sun-drenched, solarised – but incandescently coloured – retinal afterimages that the artist rolls out before us.
Blodsow’s canvases are like some early 20th century optic experiment on the relation between increase in sensation through an increase in stimulus; a peek ‘in between the penumbras’ of the mind. They alert us also to the immanence of “measuring the ‘idea’ of smelling”.
The more elaborate those experiments, the more they seemed to flag the possibility of a fear of ‘observation’. Blodsow’s critical eye spots the ‘stagnation of the observer’ within a linear optical system, a static position contradicted by the covetousness of his aspirations. It is the inherent schizophrenia of Capitalism, which is constantly objectifying subjectivity.
But here, the observer is compelled to look and come to terms with her/his own subjectivity. The individual as observer becomes an object of his own investigation. The canvas becomes the fuzzy map of her/his own fragmented personality.
What is revealed is a contemporary ambulatory observer shaped by her/his proximity to reflective public spaces like plate glass, mirror, artificial lighting, shadows and photography. There is no access here to a single image. Vision is always multiple, adjacent to and overlapping with other objects, desires, conflicts and illusions. Like, forever looking through a black box.
The artist Blodsow conflates with the observer Blodsow, somewhat in the manner of Walter Benjamin’s urban flaneur, a mobile consumer of a ceaseless succession of illusory commodity-like images.
What you get then is somewhat like, as Jonathan Crary might say, a vision caught up in its own historical afterimage.
As much as ‘the tongue-twisting trick of a clown’, this can also delineate the ‘transparency of hidden truth’. Here is an artist, both complex and complicated, but with the kind of talent that can demystify any abstraction.
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