A dark, many-armed figure smeared in red faces pink lotus buds and blooms across empty white space
A jasmine garland, the kind left behind once the evening puja is over, lies loose across a large white sheet, red and pink roses knotted along its length and parts of it left as bare pencil outline, as though the flowers were still being strung. V Ramesh painted it after a critic visiting his studio remarked that the place felt spiritual, and he set out to find what makes an ordinary space sacred.
The series gives its name to Sacred Spaces, a survey of four decades of his work curated by Tunty Chauhan of Gallery Threshold, which opened at Bikaner House with dancer Navtej Johar performing to Balachandran Raghavan’s singing and has since moved to the gallery at C-221, Sarvodaya Enclave, where it runs till November 17.
The walls carry him from the fisherfolk of the Visakhapatnam coast he painted in the eighties to the newest canvases, drawn from tales of the Nayanmars, the Tamil devotee-poets he found in a century-old Periya Puranam picked up by chance. Up close, these paintings look like pages from an old religious book, thin black lines showing under layers of orange and brown. One shows a saint holding out his hand over a golden fish with boats behind him, and another, much harder to look at, has a man raising an axe over a large animal drawn in red lines, which is where the faith and violence Ramesh talks about come together. Ramesh says he is not religious, and the saints he paints are mostly people from the margins, for whom devotion opened doors society kept shut.