Ideal Boy

Do you get up early in the morning and salute your parents? Go for morning walks, brush your teeth, bathe daily and take your meals on time? Help others and pray to god? Take part in games and social activity? This is a culturally constructed image of an "ideal boy" which is also part of civic charts. The format of the chart addresses two pedagogies - one of the educational system and its quest for facts and the need for moral instruction.

Roshan re-examines the "ideal" in a changing and often contradictory landscape of social expectation, parental responsibilities, personal freedom and western influence on a boy growing up in middle-class India.

His works can be viewed as pages from a personal scrapbook - with drawings that spill into found and ready-make objects, sculptural and site-specific installations and then back into drawings. Each work is articulated and presented as a visual cluster rather than as a stand-alone object in a singular medium. This potpourri of material and form allows the artist to express observed and experienced dichotomies in social customs, traditions, norms and conditions with conscious naivety, irony and wit.

Although Roshan attended art school, he remains predominantly a self-taught artist with no background in painting or prior interest in art history. He honed his skill by going to the railway station and drawing people and landscapes. His works allude to the self, his family and are a commentary on his middle-class surroundings.

-Abhay Maskara