Jyothi Basu

Mumbai, Artists' Center, Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Healing Properties: V.N. Jyothi Basu's Landscapes of the Self, 13 January - 19 January 2003

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V. N. Jyothi Basu was born in Kerala and currently lives in Mumbai. He received a B.A. in Fine Art from the College of Arts Trivandrum and also a Post Graduate Diploma from the University of Baroda, Faculty of Fine Arts.

Basu masterfully transforms his canvases using colour and form. His landscapes are lush with familiar and exotic forms. Most of his paintings depict night skies with stars shining brightly from above. His worlds are imaginary, and often recall popular science fiction. Alien symbols and structures often pervade his canvases, begging to be decoded and understood. Yet Basu’s canvases are a private world, known only to him. Often futuristic, these hallucinatory paintings make one wonder, is this his vision for our future?

In Traveller's Night, 2002, a vast metascape recedes into the background and the viewer is confronted with unfamiliar and strange circular structures. Vegetation grows from every available surface including the crevices on the edifice on the right. The flowers, greenery, squared fields, verdant hills and stagnant water-body, are reminiscent of the South Indian landscape where Basu grew up. Combining elements of the present with a visionary future, he is situating the viewer into a universe of his own creation; a wonderful and unknown land.

‘More recently, Jyothi Basu’s paintings have accomplished a secondary collapsing of poles. His art has always been deeply influenced by his home state of Kerala, with its dense palm tree jungles and aquatic horizons where back-water canals meet the sea. After a few years of living in the megalopolis of Bombay, Jyothi Basu has imbibed in the language of forms and patterns of chaos endemic to the city to come up with yet another synthesis of opposites, now the urban and the rural. Both are grist for his mill that pictures vegetation as an electronic grid, roadways as jungle vines, trees as concrete towers, and night skies as syncopated lighting, Jyothi Basu’s other-worldly landscapes are built of architectonic ciphers that mimic the forms of both nature (plants, animals, spores) and culture (writing, figuration, decoration).’ (Peter Nagy, Love’s Lunar Digit: The Psychotropic Cosmos of Jyothi Basu cited in Horn Please: Narratives in Contemporary Indian Art, Bern, 2008, p. 218).