Roy Thomas: Balanced Perceptions and Expression

Roy Thomas is an artist who can be said to belong to the school of 'virtual reality"  that has developed largely among young Kerala artists today. This is not escapist art that creates a dream world or throws unrelated formal elements onto the canvas to tell a story divorced from the visual images it is made up of. But rather it heightens reality we may never see but which exists below the bedrock of our visible world now divided into the seen and unseen, the celebrated and the ignored. This art looks around the corner of 'economic miracles' and •polite society' to find elements we did not suspect existed.
His mission in art reminds me of what that unforgettable poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz told me some two decades back: "One hopes to be the voice of the voiceless". And indeed, it is no accident that his daughter Salima Hashmi. became an artist of that sort. Roy's quest for the voiceless carries him to scenes of firing in which the soldier is torn from his humanity to perform a function of the state: where the bar dancer exhibits a dramatized and tawdry "beauty for sale" which has little to do With the suppressed spirit of a young woman abused by her client and legislated against while they go scot free, or how two oxen worshipped as sacred cattle, spend their lives under the ploughman's whip and are sold to the butcher when they
are too old. 
Roy excels in bringing out the ironies of life onto the canvas without going too far from the realism of day-to-day encounters. The ironic elements in some of his work like "Reflecting a Black Memory" is so subtle that one could take it to be a city-scape until one looks beyond the tinsel and garish lights into the darkness that envelopes all. This allows him to balance the demands his complex content makes and those of aesthetics. An accomplished painter and a very sensitive colourist, he will go a long way indeed with the balance he manages to strike between perceived truths and his expression of them.

Suneet Chopra
Art critic, writer