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"As I began to paint, the landscapes came naturally and gradually, the outlines faded into abstracts... 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 it starts building up relationships with other areas, other colours, and forms. This continues. There is a pause, a silence, an accident and in the end some sort of harmony." - RAM KUMAR

Ram... "As I began to paint, the landscapes came naturally and gradually, the outlines faded into abstracts... 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 it starts building up relationships with other areas, other colours, and forms. This continues. There is a pause, a silence, an accident and in the end some sort of harmony." - RAM KUMAR

Ram Kumar's works from the 1960s, especially the wellknown, early Benaras ones, were semi- representational, depicting architectonic elements - houses, passages, the iconic ghats - and relied heavily on Cubist principles. This period turned into one of pure abstraction after the 1970s: "Instead of depending on textural effects and the vitality of the variegated detail, built up carefully with the spatula, Ram now depends on colour planes, and multiple perspectives in which colour is daringly and dynamically used, often very thin, and almost like a wash, and not as a foil for textural effects but as a kind of sprung rhythm that tensions the theme and carries within its body its own symbolism." (Gagan Gill ed., Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996, p. 31)

His landscapes evolved from realistic representations to abstract interpretations, pared down to colours and forms rather than depicting an identifiable location. In works such as the present lot, the artist "translates the landscape into a system of lines, planes, blocks; their machine-edged logic, entering into dialogue with texture and tone, govern the distribution of significant masses over the picture space... He does not mirror reality, but subjects it to a prismatic analysis: his topography, for instance, is a diagram of forces in a field rather than a picturesque postcard view; each city, each trapfall is a summation of views from various angles, arranged on the same plane for the discernment of the viewer." (Ranjit Hoskote, "The Poet of the Visionary Landscape," Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996, p. 38)

The present lot, is painted in muted tones similar to his 1960s grey works, but rendered in the patchwork quilt-like colour planes of his later paintings. According to art critic Meera Menezes, "...the outer landscape would transform itself into the inner mindscape, which in turn would manifest itself on canvas and paper. The moods and sensations that were evoked in him by his meditation on the outer world would play out as colours and textures." (Meera Menezes, Ram Kumar: Traversing the Landscapes of the Mind, Mumbai: Saffronart, 2016, p. 13)

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