ARTFORUM, Critics' Picks — P.R. Satheesh "FRENETIC"

Eyes—alert and alarmed—pop out of P. R. Satheesh's paintings. Their gazes evoke the aftermath of a tense encounter, its charge still lingering. With this focus on the ocular, and the interplay of consciousness it suggests, the differences between Satheesh's subjects—be they human, fish, or insect—seem not to matter. They all appear troubled or shocked, much like the men and women who bare their teeth in F. N. Souza's paintings, here jostling for space in dense compositions made between 2014 and 2019. 

There is an echo of Pollock's movement in Satheesh's skeins of paint, though he is less interested in interrogating the properties of his medium than in depicting the slipperiness of sudden sightings of jungle creatures, which appear in memorable flash only to immediately conceal or camouflage themselves in painterly incident. 

(Excerpted from Zeenat Nagree's review of P.R. Satheesh "FRENETIC" at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke for ARTFORUM Critics' Picks)