Munnar frequently experiences deluges and landslides that wipe out life. With the onset of heavy rain comes the threat of rising and overflowing river banks. Stop chasing the rainbow (2022), evokes the fear that can plague residents of the area, especially those in housing susceptible to damage. Memories of past catastrophes remain potent for Satheesh. In the foreground of this piece, a figure flails in a watery expanse. Light streaks and sprays of white suggest the limbs thrashing and consequently churning the water body. Satheesh’s figures, like this one, are painted sparingly with an economy of line to the extent that, at times, they can feel like apparitions on the brink of slipping away. He asserts, ‘I don’t believe in the mere physicality of man. I believe everything is under gradual change and there is an instability.’

The eyes Satheesh paints are as rudimentary as his figures and yet, whether mere black dots or fuller, they hold and communicate a broad spectrum of emotions. Sunken in the verge of his mark making in A state of wanting more things (2022), are sets of eyes that signal to the multiplicity of feelings that can be embodied by a single individual. They are startled, pensive, even peaceful as they seem to contemplate an impending event. At times tethered to the outlines of a face, at others unattached, they magnetise and guide the viewer beyond the painting’s charged and haunting surfaces. Drawn into their depths, the works can be psychologically revealing and the paintwork’s volatility, expressing empathy, also performs a cathartic function.

On these pages, a continuous fine line is shaped into beasts and birds, ink blots add flourishes. The meandering forms have an affinity with Mohan Samant’s figures seen in cutouts like Pandit Madhusagar Family (1978). Samant stated, “We must address the monstrosity within,”[2] and it can be said that Satheesh’s drawings are part of his own self reckoning. While not discernible in his paintings, the spidery scrawls could well exist beneath the visible layers in a subterranean world. The paintings alternate between frenetic and diffuse, harsh and delicate, precise and unplanned with an underlying sense of Satheesh’s vulnerability. In a work like A lonely outsider (2023), Satheesh’s sensibilities are most exposed. In the lower section, a self-portrait, of sorts, is subsumed and diminished by the congested paintwork suggesting a person in tension with the world around him.

Satheesh does speak of a reclusive childhood where he isolated from his brothers. To this day he prefers to be alone. That does not limit his compassion for others, he describes how he finds himself in all his figures. His work, from a wooden sculpture of an older male figure made in his youth to some of the first paintings he made in Bangalore that featured large groups of men held behind fences to now, has people and their experiences at its core.

Dr Cleo Roberts-Komireddi