Soul-stirring quest for self

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Self Portrait by V Ramesh

T his is a review of a master painter’s work, not by an art critic but by a film writer and director. Aficionados, please pass by without reading. I don’t pretend to understand art from a holistic perspective.

I have no knowledge of the history of Indian painters or their art forms. I write this review the way an art-illiterate would, from the gut and without guile.
I approach painters with reserve. Mostly I do not understand their work, and when I do I stand up in awe. Ramesh’s work awes me, disturbs me, stirs up a hornet’s nest of emotions, leaves me exhausted. While this is art of a sublime quality, there is a huge vector of unresolved angst and relentless rage, there are angry redefinitions of beauty. Ramesh is a destroyer of illusions. Gaze at his art at your own risk.
Personally, I like Ramesh’s early work the most — but only because they reach out so effortlessly. The oils have a visceral energy, a roughness and brutal honesty. Most notably the sleeping naked couple in Nocturnal Reverie. Imagine a fisherman’s boat by the midnight shore with a couple lying naked in a tangle. Besides the realism, the dead exhaustion, the utter shamelessness of it all, it is a picture of peace and bliss. I could feel his feelings, his thick strokes stoked a raw emotion. Time warped inside me, as I felt how the couple would have rattled the boat as they had rough sex. This is art that inflames the senses and leaves you on a high.
As Ramesh grew older the artist in him wandered away from his genre. His dry pastels inform us of where he was heading — into recesses of his unresolved unconscious. Again the sexual symbolism of his untitled work hit you with brute force — the urgent coupling, the bleeding vagina, the heat and fury — the unfocused force of deep primary colours — they disturb me, make me cry out ‘enough!’ — until I tear my eyes away to save what is left of my sanity.
Then the artist greyed and wandered some more — I could feel his wounds had healed, his mind had soared into higher chakras. A telling work titled I will not fight speaks up for his sense of self. The warrior folds his hands in obeisance to his guru, ‘the emotion of rajas’ is being forsaken for the lucent ‘sattva’. Ramesh has stopped fighting. From man as a raging animal, man becomes a divine act of coalesced light. I would suggest you flip through the book in reverse — it’s so much more enjoyable! In his self-portrait, a blue bodied Ramesh on the bend with his head in a luminous haze, has somehow managed to open his heart chakra, while the bud in his groins droops like its use is over. Years passed, Ramesh went into a preachy phase. In Wages of Samsara, behind an outline of another urgent coupling, again an engorged penis stuffing a flaming vagina, nude women are being whipped as crows peck their dainty flesh. Fires of hell devour the woman as The Lords of the Netherworld look on. Is Ramesh trying to pay back his own wages of samsara? Or is he stubbornly clinging to the giant penis inside his head? We’ll never know.
A story of Ribhu and Nidagha tries an explanation. It hovers around the Ramana Maharishi’s gentle enquiry of Naan Yaar or ‘who am I’. Ramesh says the story has inspired these paintings. But I am far from convinced. If Advaita philosophy was indeed the goal, these canvases hardly seem the path towards it.
But critics are rushing to praise his work. Gayatri Sinha says, “Ramesh successfully conflates skshetra with body and body with kshetra”. Gayatri seems to have forgotten her Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita. Kshetra in its true sense means the human body, and not a mountain, a river or a city. To conflate Ramana Maharishi with the Arunachala mountain and say it’s a new interpretation of the ancient belief is completely wrong.
Ramana Maharishi is too great and too enlightened a person to be superimposed on a mountain and palmed off as art. He doesn’t need to be layered with birds, clouds, rocks and trees. That gentle gaze is enough. To me this isn’t art — but I have to concede that you may find it inspiring. Beauty is in the visual cortex and pre frontal lobe of the beholder.
Thankfully, that phase seems to have passed. The artist is being reborn again, phoenix like, from the ashes of his ceased self. In his latest avatar Ramesh re-establishes his genius. In A Poet’s Prayer a new energy infuses his soul, and his lines are charged with power fluidity and grace. It is among the most radiant and inspiring paintings I have ever seen. It fills me with joy just to gaze at it.
Enough! Go get your own copy. Cut out a dozen of your most favourite and mount it on your bedroom walls. The print quality is excellent. Ramesh is sublime. Your home will be enlivened. What are you waiting for?