Babu Xavier

Babu Xavier's canvases inhabit a fevered and fantastical terrain, where dream, desire and creaturely life appear to arise from the same source. Without the formal scaffolding of academic training, he shaped his practice through his association with Jayapal Panicker and a sustained engagement with painting itself. Reds, yellows and blues fill the canvas with an intensity that precedes the figures. Within these saturated fields, bodies intertwine with nature, animal forms and symbolic presences. Desire, mortality and unease move through the work as linked energies, and the result is a painting that confronts the viewer with the more difficult truths of existence.