Important Notice

This painting, from 1974, is representative of the deconstructionist stage of Ram Kumar’s abstraction. It was in the early 1970s that the artist temporarily turned away from his focus on Varanasi with their houses and temples. What emerged was a series of landscapes, unrecognizable in terms of context or geography, but imbued with a palette that reflected the natural elements that were put together in terrains he was familiar with – earth, water... This painting, from 1974, is representative of the deconstructionist stage of Ram Kumar’s abstraction. It was in the early 1970s that the artist temporarily turned away from his focus on Varanasi with their houses and temples. What emerged was a series of landscapes, unrecognizable in terms of context or geography, but imbued with a palette that reflected the natural elements that were put together in terrains he was familiar with – earth, water and sky.

As the art critic and a close friend of Kumar’s, Richard Bartholomew puts it, “There is a spatial quality in the recent painting (1970 onwards), a sense of flight, of movement, and there is an aerial perspective (sometimes a series of perspectives), and it seems that the painter is looking at a landscape in a number of ways and from different angles and points of view. Many of the forms in these recent paintings refer to and resemble the forms in the violently faceted and fragmented background of the paintings of the mid-1950s.” (“The Abstract as a Pictorial Proposition” in Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996, p.30). The critic Ranjit Hoskote calls Kumar’s works from this period “abstractionist hymns to nature”, saying that along with architectural forms, “society itself passed from his concerns…the landscape became its own architecture” (“Part of a World: Reflections on the Art of Ram Kumar”, in Ram Kumar – Recent Works, Saffronart and Pundole Art Gallery, 2002, p.6)

In these canvases, not only did Kumar move past the human figure, but he also moved past its habitations in an effort to express as simply as possible the effects that the natural environs he had experienced had on him. Most often, the emotion these works convey to viewers is a kind of solitude – one that the artist felt on his travels to remote places like Ladakh.

Apart from their representation of fertile and barren earth, clouds and rock, the angular, horizontal shards of colour in this canvas also bestow it with a sense of movement or constant flux, leaving the viewer with questions rather than answers about the shifting, personal architecture of Ram Kumar’s painterly world. In this work, it is color, in the juxtaposition of shades and subtleties of tone, rather than texture or form that communicates Kumar’s message to his viewers – a message that the artist Jagdish Swaminathan explains poetically as ‘Refraction’. He elaborates, “It does not make you seek, it makes you wonder…A refraction which makes you realize the reality of the mundane, the familiar, and in consequence, makes you real. You stand revealed to yourself, alone, in the living mirage of the world.” (On presenting Kumar with the Kalidas Samman in 1986, in Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, 1996, p. 210)

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