How do we aestheticize the speed of a video game ? What is the sense of perspective in the visual memory of a child having grown up watching videos? With much gusto as you stare into Santanu Hazarika’s drawing book, an anime image of Saraswati emerges on an owl, you map the speed as its loops into a hue of ochre. In a recent interview Santanu talks of his influences which include the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami to the video game conceptualiser Hidetaka Miyazaki, but his practice does not remain flat on the surface like Murakami, it holds the speed of the video game, but unlike Miyazaki, Santanu vocabularises his imagery independently.

Santanu Hazarika born in 1992, Guwahati, is an autodidact artist who began drawing as way to deflect the drudgery of Indian school curriculums, his initial reference points were comic magazines from the West found in the few second hand book stores to be found in his city. The content for an 8 year old was beyond what he had imagined, these were books that were infested with violence and sexual imagery, plots and stories that Santanu could not understand but was drawn to them with an electric intensity.
Digital Art exists within the definition of art generated through computer based technology and is a term that has been in use since the 1960s and has included art produced through computer graphics, algorithms and using the medium in the forms of video, photography, sound and kinetic interventions. Street Art or Post Graffiti art is a term that emerged in the 1960s that took on a popular guerrilla form of graffiti that was pillared on accessibility, walls, realism and political satire. Street Artists often used pseudonyms and acquired anonymity to make works that were deeply critical of the state and society – a notable example is Banksy. Using stencils, spray paint and the cover of night to draw up images that now travel across the world through digital mediums of Facebook, Instagram and news media.

Though Anime or animation was pioneered in Europe, it has been popular in Japan since the early 20th century. Japanese woodcut prints have a similar aesthetic vision of perspective, colouring and placement of human figures. The narrative is spontaneous, surreal and comic in Japanese woodcuts. From the 17th century onwards a great interest developed in western Europe for Asian painting transported through woodcuts prints from East Asia. In 1902 when the Japanese cultural thinker Okakura Tenshin or Okakura Kakuzo visited Calcutta he met with Rabindranath Tagore and later he met him during his last year in America in 1913, the year of Okakura’s death. Tagore visited Japan many times after winning his Nobel Prize and later invited art teachers from Japan to come teach the wash technique in Santiniketan, the University he founded based on these alternate cosmopolitans as the described by Rustom Bharucha. I mention Digital Art, Street Art and Anime in the essay that elaborates on Santanu Hazarika’s practice to place Santanu within the context of art criticism and contextualize his visual references.

Broken homes make strange bed-fellows, often art is a sanctuary for the mind, we allay our disappointments with creation. Santanu befriended musicians who were into Heavy Metal and became a member of the Guwahati’s underground music scene. He began designing covers and these illustrations opened up a genre that was universal. Simon Castets and Hans Ulrich Obrust founded a long term program ‘ 89 Plus ‘ – of future cultural producers who would define our visualscape in the future, specifically those who were interconnected through the social networking platforms of the internet. Specifically Instagram. The artists chosen were to be born after a specific year – 1989. As we know 1989 was a year of turmoil but a new universalism emerged within a globalscape of imagination. Culture was now not contained between borders. Guwahati, the city of the Eastern Light, is like Japan is to the world, Assam is to India. It’s a metropolis but one stained by violence, like most of India it remained in abject neglect economically and socially till the 90s. But the human condition does not allow subjection to times and history. Santanu emerges as an outlier drawing from what he got visually – from Attari video games to hand me down comic magazines to connections with heavy metal music. In the definitions of the cultural theorist Hans Ulrich Obrust these are artists who represent more than half of the world’s population and arrive at their visuals through the internet. We cannot define Santanu’s art as graffiti, pop art or guerrilla art, but in a new genre that is emerging but not yet defined and it is not post internet art. Firstly because the internet is not over, we are still inhabiting its wonders, we are right now at the stage of digital violence which is our generation’s social pandemic. We all live in digital colonies of hope and fear defined by what is sent out to us visually.

Anime today is the bedrock of video game visual culture and anime has progressed and spread on the walls of modern day graffiti. The transformation of street art onto Instagram as the mode of distribution and dispersion is interesting. Most graffiti artists and painters have hugely popular Instagram accounts where their renditions find millions of followers. Santanu comes from Assam, and in Guwahati on the summit of a hill in the city you have the temple of Kamakhya that is built like a woman’s womb, rituals around the temple draw heavily from mother worship and menstruation. Guwahati has long known the traditions of the occult and tantric worship. His Saraswati mounted on the Eagle – Owl is an example of that surreal tantric realism. With the Santiniketan a school of wash painting as a new genre emerged that rejected the Western Realism being taught at colonial schools of art established by the British across India. This along with its aesthetic connections to indigenous Bazaar painting and miniature schools spread across India as a stylistic vocabulary to depict Gods and Goddesses. Assam is within the cultural sphere on Bengal, though its traditions of music, song and storytelling come from the past glories of the Ahom Empire. Even though Santanu had been drawing out of comic books, drawings that he would sell to friends in school to raise money for himself, as a child, when he left his engineering course and was sitting idle at home, he began exploring myths from Hinduism where he found the subjects of his work. This makes his inspirations distinct from other street artists. The interconnections of age old philosophy and myth in image making, with techniques and aesthetics found in animation make his works eclectic with a narrative situated in the 21st century.

In 2014 after a long period of personal struggle, having dropped out of engineering college Santanu, won the first ever Redbull World Doodle Art Championship in Capetown. He arrived at the competition through a friend’s suggestion on Facebook. India today sits within a corporate visual realm of popular culture. Santanu has had collaborations with Reebok, NDTV, Gully Gang and Azadi Records. With Ritviz he recently made India’s first ever NFT sale. In February 2022 during the Mumbai Gallery Weekend he opens a solo at the Gallery Art & Soul called BLCK. Santanu began his practice using the deep black tones of India Ink, so when you doodle using black ink, the metascape it allows is very graphic, there are no tonal qualities you rather depend on the ability to sketch, it absorbs light. Perhaps BLCK is a reflection on his artistic practice, it absorbs popular culture into intertwined vines of hands, skulls, human bodies and images that mirror our minds, the chaos that descends into our bodies from the images that we consume. Black is not a primary colour, but in the history of humans we all emerged from the colour Black on our skins, our cultures, civilizations all date back to Africa. The antecedents of Heavy Metal, surreal drawing and music to which we dance out our 30 second videos all have origins to the continent. Black absorbs red, green and blue to make its hue and is present in nature at the beginning of things – life’s inception and at the end.

We see here that Santanu first begins with a doodle that finds life on an app called Instagram. Instagram is the platform for dissemination. But he also makes works in association with brands for the internet platform, the conceptualisation of these works happens within the construct of them being viewed on Instagram. He makes creative solutions for brands such as Reebok and does NFTs for art within the spontaneity of changing landscapes of visual culture. His art is not made into an NFT, rather he makes art as non-fungible tokens. Presently we see a drag and recession in the art world specifically an attrition of the audiences as the young millennials now consume visual culture through more accessible formats on the internet, in design such as Ikea, in zine publications and collaborations between brands and artists. This might be seen as assimilation with corporate culture and capitalisation with visual culture. Visual culture always existed in close proximity of capital either it was the church, royal patronage or during conceptualism – the state.

Brands such as Reebok or Red Bull have global access and reach. As humans we are separated from political consciousness by acts of manufactured consent through consumerism – defined by Noam Chomsky as the end of individual rights and democracy. Instagram and the internet is where this consent is manufactured, we build tastes and styles for consumerist want and action. Visual culture is an essential tool in its manifestation, people dress themselves, fashion homes and eat better food looking at influencers. Political movements and social change happens through these pages. There is deep intermixing. For his solo show Santanu delves into the deep realms of himself, bones, anatomy and landscape narrate myths, erotica, humour and pain. We come across an artist who is multiplying his stories through his works.

He inhabits the gallery painting around a bed where he sleeps on, like an influencer he is naked in front of the audience, they come seek and view his truths laid bare to scrutiny. This is not an exalted position but the demystifying of a soul seen in the distance of the internet. Love and its prerogative to find forms of culture is very existent in his output, basic emotions are laid bare whether it is in his relationship or it is in the recent death of his grandmother. He also has found a wall in Worli to go paint on a graffiti for children from the surrounding slums. The image was first found in a doodle, then disseminated through Instagram and perhaps its process will be found in an Instagram reel showing him execute the mural. Okakura and Rabindranath has predicted this cultural universality when the world had just begun to gather and exchange across geographies. We now live in the times of the internet and Santanu is the apostle of visuality in our times bringing technology, myth and painting together. A visual laboratory is set up at Art & Soul, the realm of art here is decorative but accessible, we see a definite change. The exhibition runs the length of the Mumbai Gallery Weekend, a time where varied practices of art come to focus and here we show the practice of a popular art form yet undefined but to be seen by many within the context of contemporary art and its criticism. BLCK, Santanu Hazarika’s solo show emerges as an exhibit of a phenomenon that presents a practice which is an enigma of the person who creates visual networks of personal histories, video gaming, popular culture and the skill to draw. It’s our moment for an art form to emerge from our interiors crafted and scripted by a genius image maker.

Art & Soul Editorial, 2021.