Osian's Auction Catalogue Masterpieces and Museum-Quality III | March 2004

146 OSIAN’S “ Surendran’s context is his country and its protean facility for the evolved religious images. What he does is to exploit this avidity for invention for entirely subversive ends. He fastidiously picks at the icon even as he decontextualizes it, and renders it as both fixed and changeable paradigm in his field of play. Surendran’s language plays upon the religious and the popular icon. Liberally sprinkled with visual and literary puns the icon becomes a surrealist object of fancy, which can pleasure or maim the body, or render it a field for the enactment of puns… Between the known and the new, Nair posits a tantalizing and provocative argument through an extraordinarily developed lexicon of images.” (Gayatri Sinha, rpt. in Combine—Voices for the New Century EXC . NGMA, New Delhi 2000.)