T. Venkanna’s works are contemporary remakes of the early works of French painter Henri Rousseau, famed for his fantastical illustrations of jungle scenes and botanical gardens. Rousseau was chastised and then celebrated for his imaginative escapism and early primitive style in Paris. Venkanna, from his studio in Baroda, faithfully reproduced two of the works from Henri Rousseau’s repertoire. The first is appropriated from Rousseau’s 1910 painting titled The Dream. The historical significance of this work is not lost on Venkanna as he intentionally renders it as a post-modern image with idiosyncratic undertones. Venkanna adds a second panel to the Dream in Dream painting. Turned on its side, the thin canvas takes the same subject but satirises it using cartoons to the point where the panel becomes garish.

Two Moon is based on an original work by Rousseau entitled The Sleeping Gypsy 1897. In his second canvas from the series Venkanna has taken the original scene from Rousseau’s painting and duplicated it as a repetition of the motifs within the painting itself. With very deliberate alterations to his canvas, Venkanna’s sleeping gypsy is both alive and dead, as he paints in a skeleton where Rousseau had painted a resting figure in multi-coloured dress. The painting also resembles post-war American painting styles in using additional red arrows on the surface of the canvas, crudely labelling the edge of the work.