I've been meaning to feature the work of Kerala-born artist and painter Tito Stanley SJ ever since I experienced his paintings at Lokame Tharavadu. He's one of those artists every tiny crop from the painting reveals new layers and whole worlds within a square inch.
Tito's exhibition Intangible World of a Stranger by Tito features new paintings that amalgamate grief and light with mysticism. The exhibition raises diverse questions and meanings to the existing notions of life and death.
Delighted to share a glimpse of his incredible detailed work:
About the artist:
Tito Stanley S J was born in Abu Dhabi in 1994 to parents from Kerala. He moved back to India in 2000. He graduated from the College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram, having majored in painting in 2019. In his early childhood,Tito Stanley experienced the displacement of existing between two-cultures, being from another place—the UAE and returning to the land of his heritage—Kerala. This formative acculturation seems to underpin much of his developing visual language as a gaze.
The gaze inherent in Stanley’s works encompasses the experience of isolation and being ‘other’ of being ‘alien’ and of being an ‘outsider’. Yet it is this gaze, deeply sardonic, allegorical and observational, that is the point of difference and uniqueness that Stanley offers to contemporary painting in Kerala and India. His gaze affords Tito Stanley a gap in observation, in which he can insert himself symbolically or literally within his painting, while remaining outside of the culture he is immersed in. This juxtaposition is used to reveal the absurdity of doctrine and politics that Tito Stanley seems to be attempting to reconcile. At present he is pursuing MVA in painting from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda.
Follow his work on Instagram @s.j_tito_stanley or visit his website www.titostanleysj.com