V. Ramesh

Ramesh’s large canvases are the subject of curiosity and debate for their unique concern with the idea of faith and renunciation in contemporary times.

For example, the concept of withdrawal from worldly concerns by renouncing creature comforts on the one hand, and going against the conventions of devotional practice on the other, is fore grounded in all its complexity in the series Sanctum Sanctorum: A Corner for Four Sisters. It explores the quest of four savants from different historical and geographic moments, whose devotional postures read like a protest against blind faith and soulless ritual.

The artist celebrates the quest for transcendent truth in the disconnected figures of KaraikkalAmma (5thC), Manikkavachagar (8thC), Lal Ded (14thC) and Ramana Maharshi (20thC), all of whom embody the curious concept of the sacred heretic.

In the series, which includes works like Remembering Lalla Moj, The Poet’s Passion and KaraikkalAmma, the background absorbs details of the calligraphic surface, even as sandwiched and vaporous figures, like the emaciated physical frame of KaraikkalAmma framed in thorny foliage, gestures to her prayer for being de-fleshed, strongly hinting at the transience of the body.

Similarly, in an earlier work Untitled, 2006, the modern-day sage of Tiruvannamalai, Ramana Maharshi’s face is rendered in some detail even as his frail frame gets distributed within the landscape – akin to a molecular dis/integration in nature.

The idea of transcendence is predominant in Ramesh’s work. The dialogue that he sets up between the ambiguities of the material and the immanence of the transcendent, is a modern-day problematic located in the dialectic of individuation and differentiation. Self assured and in control of his material, the artist seeks to trace the complex and agonizing pathways along which the sub-conscient elevates and achieves supra consciousness. It is almost an anticipation of a future, evolving humanity that would stay perennially in touch with its consciousness.

Ramesh is, thus, heir to a fecund ancestry of mystical and quasi-ritualistic practices in the arts, both pre-modern and modern. The modern phase of Indian art from the mid-19^th century, has consistently jousted with multiple lineages of the mystical, mythological and magical that it inherited from a plethora of belief systems and their dissensions. Raja Ravi Varma’s Ramayana paintings or Abanindranath Tagore’s Bharat Mata (from the late 19th and early 20th century, respectively), are early instances of mythological material seeding the foundations of modern Indian art practices.

Simultaneously, art historians like Coomaraswamy and Zimmer contributed a philosophical and scholarly depth to this by their study of traditional concepts, forms, symbols and architecture.

It will be interesting to remember also that early twentieth century theatre and cinema too employed mythology as an allegorical disguise to deliver contemporary political statements. It turned out to be an effective strategy to beat colonial censorship. Khadilkar’s Keechak Vadh or Dada sahib Phalke’s Kaliya Mardan were complex artistic products that emerged on the sidelines of the Indian nationalist upsurge and movement for political independence.

By the 1940s and ‘50s, art movements in India—in their quest for distinctly native and indigenous vocabularies, as opposed to that of the West—were re-connecting with more ‘traditional’, non-figurative lineages of ‘Tantra’, ‘Lokayata’ and other popular motifs, which had highly evolved codes of formal symbols and color abstraction. It was a call, once again, to the nationalistic impulse to be more ‘Indian.’

Artists of the Cholamandal collective, in Madras, like K.V. Haridasan, V. Viswanadhan, Akkitham Narayanan and Gopinath, among others and artists from the North like G.R. Santosh, Biren De and S.H. Raza constitute a special group that adopted this route.

The works of V. Ramesh need to be framed within this larger context of artistic engagement with deeply personal and cultural memory—as a product of internal retreat and introspection— that seeks to transmute corporeality into transcendence. It engages with abstractions like evanescence and a search for the self. This turns Ramesh into a fabulist, using a sensuous and emotive palette to spin parables culled from sages, mystics and poets. The effect is tapestry-like, with multiple layers of submerged narratives like those seen in frescoes or murals; the visual equivalent of a time-lapsed call of haunting voices across time.

There is palpable evidence in his work, of an intoxicated pursuit of the ineffable. And yet, there is also a sense of ‘this-worldly’ mysticism, jousting with several contesting and conflicting poles—of restraint and release, celibacy and profligacy, denial and indulgence, and the temporary and the permanent.

The artist seems to mock the mortality of earthly duration over that of the spiritual. He knows human life is as precarious as a dewdrop on the tip of a leaf at the edge of the branch of a tree on which a tribe of monkeys is jumping around. His quest, therefore, is not necessarily for the ‘material’ body, but for the ‘subtle’ body. And it is this subtle body, which then inveigles itself into his canvas in all sorts of manifestations.

The artist draws upon the myriad sub-continental philosophies of formlessness, or of the divine as a ‘void’. While acknowledging the ‘material body’ (sthoola), it is the ‘subtle body’ (sookshma), which he extols as a form of the all-pervasive consciousness of the universe– an invisible, but highly present, extension of the body. It is this native philosophy, which informs his canvas in all sorts of manifestations of saint figures like AkkaMahadevi and RamanaMaharshi who denied the body over the spirit.

Ramesh’s oeuvre then, opens up an interesting space for engaging with the debate on how to evaluate his work from a modernist perspective. He is certainly one of many artists who seem to have fallen through the cracks of modern Indian art history, which does not favor what it cannot define. It needs to be pointed out that what an artist like Ramesh achieves is a rebellious de-iconocization, despite investing in material that otherwise occupies the realm of the iconic.

And this is what contributes to his critical modernity.