The exhibition, Recent Works on Canvas, by artist Ram Kumar is a collection of his abstract cityscapes and landscapes. By Team Viva
Ram Kumar has not titled any of his works except blandly label them as Recent Works on Canvas. An artist of his status might have passed the phase of naming an art work. Rather he seems to have left the choice to his viewers to understand the abstract paintings. And the oeuvres unambiguously reflect the transformation of the nonagenarian, as a book on him aptly mentions, “from solitude to salvation.”
The exhibition is the quintessence of Kumar’s abstract art that requires one’s instant involvement at the moment of impact. It covers Kumar’s oeuvre from his figurative work, through his evolution to abstract cityscapes and landscapes, with a set of new works. “There are selected paintings over the last 30 years. The show has paintings from each period,” he says. The work on Varanasi can help align with the sights and sounds of the place to create one’s reality. The holy city has fascinated the artist much, the uniqueness of which, he believes, lies in the fact that life and death have no meaning there.
The work of ladakh, however, is a journey into space; into infinity. “The landscape haunted me for quite some time. later when I tried to paint my impressions on canvas, I couldn’t imagine any colour. The eternal silence of a wasted, barren earth which refused to compromise with man couldn’t be visualise in colours except grey and black and white,” says the artist, a contemporary of F N Souza, S H Raza and M F Husain.
The artist’s play of colour and texture in these works reflects his inner spirit which is quiet, meditative and inventive. It reveals an astute intellect and rare sensitivity. In Untitled 2010, the artist divulges the message of the trees that rise from the abstract landscape. The fountain of colour flows all around, but the trees remain rooted to the earth in it. The poetic line and use of space elevates another untitled painted from 2005, affirming the harmony between the mountains, the seas and the greenery. Stripped of sentiment and freed from the burden of description, the landscapes have an inner voice waiting to be heard.
“like Richard Bartholomew noted about the artist, his world picture has not changed since the 50s. His imagery has undergone a process of synthesis, refinement and rare fiction. There has been a process of sublimation. There has been a subtractive process at work, as it were. The process in his work has always been a subtle reference to what came before, and even though the artist has not returned to the ‘figurative’ nature of his work since the 1960s, it is worth noting that his works continue to speak of the human condition,” observes show curator Sonia Ballaney, who has been working with the artist for the past several years.
Ram Kumar’s landscapes often straddle the boundaries between abstraction and naturalism, courting both but succumbing to neither. “With a cool palette of aquas, blues, grays and tawny yellows, his prime motifs swing between the numerous visitations he made to Banaras and the open views that are in essence painterly vestiges of his life’s journey. By banishing the figure, he was able to emphasise the nullification of humanity, and to deploy architecture and landscape as metaphors articulating cultural and psychological fragmentation. He translates the landscape into a system of line, planes, blocks; their machine-edged logic, entering into dialogue with texture and tone, governs the distribution of significant masses over the picture space,” she adds.
Ram Kumar, who belongs to the first generation of post-colonial Indian artists, elaborates: “There is an enigmatic mystery about the inner life of a colour applied on canvas. It stands out by itself in the beginning but slowly starts building up relationships with other areas, colours and forms. This continues. There is a pause, a silence, an accident and in the end some sort of harmony or no harmony.”
The exhibition is on at Vadehra Art Gallery till February 22.