The Restless Field
P. R. Satheesh
P.R. Satheesh’s practice resists containment. It unfolds across large, multi-panel paintings that engulf the viewer, as well as in dense ink drawings that compress entire cosmologies into a single page. In both mediums, marks accumulate restlessly: eyes, mouths, and limbs surface only to dissolve back into the lattice of strokes that sustains them. The result is less a portrait of individuals than a charged terrain, alive with forms that refuse resolution. Whether expansive or intimate, the works carry the weight of duration—months and sometimes years of labour in paint, or the slow accretion of line on paper. What they ultimately register is not time measured but attention sustained, an intensity pressed into surface until it becomes a record of lived pressure. These drawings and paintings hold more than the record of observation; they stage the instability of life lived at the edge of certainty. Even the most resolved surfaces retain a sense of becoming, of forms perpetually caught in flux.
Satheesh was born in 1970 in Bisonvalley village, Idukki, Kerala, into an agrarian family whose move to a cardamom plantation placed him on the threshold of cultivated land and dense forest. His years of farming, his encounters with deluge and landslide, his reclusive labour in the studio—all inflect the work with a consciousness of fragility. His work crystallises a position the artist has long embodied—working largely in private, showing his work sparingly, yet remaining tethered to the lives and landscapes that surround him.
Thara Parambi