Finding purpose in the prosaic

BY NEHA MALUDE

To breathe life and meaning into the everyday-ness of life – if that is art then Sosa Joseph is rightly an artist. Exhibiting her work as part of the ongoing Sydney Biennale, Joseph’s paintings straddle the space between reality and fantasy, all the while seeking inspiration in life’s daily goings-on and recreating them in evocative ways.

The people, animal and other beings (and non-beings) in her paintings that span a broad spectrum of human activity are a direct reflection of life found in her home town in Kochi, Kerala, which is where she works after having post-graduated in painting from the MS University of Baroda.

The titles for Anywhere But Nowhere, 2018, and Your Earth, My World, 2018 both reference the universal sensibility present in

Joseph’s paintings, while Performers implies that the people depicted in her paintings are not merely entangled in the everyday, but actors in the theatre of life.

A contemporary artist, Joseph clearly has a penchant for bold colours and strokes and features that are, more often than not, wildly exaggerated. As a result, the paintings appear like a work of fantasy suspended in reality, but instead of evoking a feeling of discomfort about fantasy and reality being meshed together, they create a feeling of calm. And therein lies the charm of her art that portrays the commonalities of life.

The characters etched by Joseph exhibit the daily drudgery of life, but a deeper look reveals something beyond the ordinary, something that’s cast in a die of the ordinary – and is anything but. A monotonous life can be unexciting. But routine can also be freeing – it provides continuity and security. Routine provides structure, and is therefore comforting. And isn’t that we are all looking for in the end, comfort and familiarity?