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Born in 1961 in Mangalore, India, Sudarshan Shetty graduated in 1985 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts from the Sir J.J. School of Art, Bombay.
Sudarshan’s work since his 1995 show *Paper Moon* and on through *Consanguinity* of 2003, has consistently engaged with the idea of boundaries - personal, psychological, social and fleshly; a celebration of the materials that define them and finally, a brutal narrative of their inevitable destruction. In its evolution, Sudarshan’s work, from his early paintings, to his recent installations and current kinetic sculpture-assemblages has exhibited his preoccupation with the pleura and its supporting matrix - membranes and their correspondent secretions that fold over and overflow from the personal to the public, forming both the layers that protect and expose, and the fluids that flow between and interrupt the courses of human interactions.
*Love*, a solo showing of works in Mumbai in 2006, *Pure*, the result of a residency at The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh in the spring of 2007 and a single, untitled work in a curated show called *Pink*, in the fall of the same year, all display this preoccupation with the suffocating viscosity of human life; even as they delicately expose those few and various experiences that reach the sublime before they pulverize into nothingness.
Sudarshan’s use of furniture and containers is singular and their employment in defining and examining the various shades of everyday life and its sometimes extraordinary events, is particular to the finished nature of his works. By employing the simple device of skewing scale or changing the lens one is used to viewing with, by growing a tree of drainage pipes or simply by repeatedly filling a tube with a moving bloody fluid, he reiterates his preoccupation with the domestic and its attendant inertia, the bodily and its ever-elusive potential for the sublime. In the same stroke, he challenges history and laughs at its detritus – a Thonet chair covered with ‘desi eggs’, a terracotta pot gently rocking on a series of precision-axles repeatedly ejecting all traces of a human life, as a Hindu man tosses it once over the right shoulder in an ancient ritual to pour out the water for his dead father; a stainless steel dinosaur making noiseless, metallic love to a Jaguar convertible while the sweet lovemaking of a cow straddling her male Other results in the ringing of temple bells.
His formal concerns have been closely connected with the kinetic aspect of essentially inert objects– a dichotomy that he has enjoyed dissecting and displaying repeatedly in his finished ‘moving stories’. Mechanical repetition and anachronism - the potential for madness and genius that sameness is always in the danger of providing, is another of the artist’s formal preoccupations. He stresses his commitment to the powerful and inescapable truth of the quotidian, by courageously repeating himself in conceiving and engineering works that examine this fundamental truth of the human condition.
This duality of chronological misplacement and sameness which he is so preoccupied with is also simply displayed in his concurrent use of the digital and the analog – some works give a sense of being engaged in a continuous, solitary war using weapons from the 20th century to fight the particular terrors of the 21st. There is a curious characteristic of childishness in exquisitely adult-themed works, even as the morbidity of a life close to death is displayed in other works so overtly child-like in their separate elements.
::: Dentures without a mouth to occupy, tall stool with prosthetic limb, row of vitrified eyeballs, pairs of marching, transparent thermoplastic shoes, rocking horse-clinging baby, blind typewriter :::
Sudarshan’s method of employing these vessels, toys and shrouds of life, living and death allows a clear view in, through the crosshairs of a mind where it is plain for all to see that here is how a carpenter- philosopher–scientist–poet is a son–friend–husband-lover; and is finally an artist who believes that in the act of living, “one is always condemned to be elsewhere”.
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