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Lot 79

 

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Ram Kumar’s works from the mid and late 1960s represent the earliest phase of his deconstructionist abstraction. Turning away from his focus on the city of Varanasi and its teetering riverbank architecture, the artist began painting the landscape in its most pristine form, unrecognizable in terms of geography or location. In these large canvases, with their fractured planes and multiple perspectives, Kumar moves beyond the human figure and its... Ram Kumar’s works from the mid and late 1960s represent the earliest phase of his deconstructionist abstraction. Turning away from his focus on the city of Varanasi and its teetering riverbank architecture, the artist began painting the landscape in its most pristine form, unrecognizable in terms of geography or location. In these large canvases, with their fractured planes and multiple perspectives, Kumar moves beyond the human figure and its habitations to express as simply as possible the wildness and solitude of the natural environs he encountered during his youth in the foothills of the Himalayas and his later travels around the country.

“By banishing the figure from his kingdom of shadows, the artist was able to emphasise the nullification of humanity, and to deploy architecture and landscape as metaphors articulating cultural and psychological fragmentation, the bondage of an imposed destiny that strangled the will to liberation and self-knowledge” (Ranjit Hoskote, “Parts of a World: Reflections on the Art of Ram Kumar”, Ram Kumar Recent Works, Saffronart and Pundole Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2002, p. 6).

As the artist explains, “…perhaps a human face or a recognizable image shuts all doors to an observer as far as the basic essence of a work of art is concerned. Only the superficial image remains on the surface which has very little to do with art. As in classical music words are insignificant. In art image is distraction” (as quoted in “From Ram Kumar’s Notebooks”, Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 1996, p. 201).

Eliminating all ‘distraction’, Kumar developed an abstract idiom for his landscapes that was as influenced by Cubism as it was by aerial photography. In the present lot, a large canvas, the artist uses a palette dominated by greens and browns, and builds abutting stacks of block-like wedges of paint to describe the timeless topography. Elaborating on his unique abstract vocabulary, Hoskote notes, “When he dissolves and re-concretises the motif, Ram Kumar does not simply replicate the visible; we respond to his meditative frames precisely because they have moved from the perceptual to the conceptual, from semblance to structure. He does not mirror reality, but subjects it to prismatic analysis: his topography, for instance, is a diagram of forces in a field rather than a picturesque post-card view; each city, each trapfall is a summation of views from various angles, arranged on the same plan for the discernment of the viewer. Ram Kumar translates the landscape, often, into a surveyor’s table of notations, of contour lines, benchmarks and pressure graphs.” (“The Poet of the Visionary Landscape”, Ibid., p. 38)

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