To look at a landscape by the modern master Ram Kumar is to be drawn into a sojourn that signifies the story of reflection and renewal, nostalgia born out of the dignity of detachment, and when you do so there unravels a travelogue of transcendence.
Saffronart Delhi is celebrating the season of advent with an epic exhibition of 1924-born artist Ram Kumar. Over the years he has revelled in landscapes of unique, quaint planes that can jam the horizontal perspective of an overview. You could think of mappings and aerial photography, you could also think of a solitary quest in which an artist creates a series of quiet conversations within the context of Cubist geometry. For an Economics major from St. Stephen’s College, communist at heart, cerebral melancholist who was close to French philosophers and writers in Paris, one who worked in the atelier of Andre Lhote and Fernand Leger, this exhibition is an ode of profound cityscapes on paper.
A work by Ram Kumar
Mendicant’s monologues
The earliest works in the show belonging to the 60s ripple with moody notes of a mendicant’s monologues – small wax monochromes that cue into formal geometric strokes of a penumbra of memories. When you see the date 1967 and some others without a date and see the edges of the yellowed paper there is an echo of vintage vitality that ensues. Recall the truth that Ram Kumar the voracious reader, has in the past referenced the philosophers and sages of all legions and spoken at length about his life long fascination with Varanasi and Ladakh.
Walk around and study the monochromatic works first – in these Ram Kumar embodies the drift and flux of a universe hinged together in minimalist mechanics. Small stairs and little apertures of light are orchestrated as an elegant equilibrium of endlessly floating frames. Indeed sometimes a cobalt blue peeps into the crevice and you know these meditative frames are part of a sojourn that embraces the perceptual and conceptual, from the symbolism of structure to the embodiment of the sublime. Thick impasto provides materiality and pulse, jagged lines define terrains as you gaze at pen and ink, pastel and waxed virtuoso. Symmetry is eclipsed in favour of the spontaneity of coarse, thick strokes, metaphorising the landscape of an inner vision.
Ram Kumar
Cubist notions
Each scene is a registration of elegance – Cubist principles and abstract expressionism recur. The darker recesses are as mesmeric as the drawings. In 1998, when I spoke to him at length about drawings and his life in Paris and all that he learnt from Fernand Leger, Ram Kumar said: “I learned that drawings must always be strict and unsentimental, that was a great lesson. In those years I watched how they embraced Cubist notions of fracturing objects into geometric shapes, but retained an interest in depicting the illusion of three-dimensionality. Somehow that fundamental principle stayed with me. I learnt to create urban fragments within the frames of time.”
For Ram Kumar strokes and cross hatching densities form an arcadia of equally elusive islands. As elements of his inner ideation surge there is a quiescent lyricism that unravels – of time and place. It also reflects an austerity of a relic of history seen through the eyes of an artist of scholarly merit. We could look at these works as soliloquies, or as a timbre of melancholic melody, one that pans out as an evening raga in its eloquent alaap.
Cadences in flux
The coloured landscapes are yet another pathway – the subtle and staccato find their little eddying bays in nature: there could be the soaring wedge of the mountain, the filigree fork of a watershed, an ambitious avalanche, or the flood burst of a monsoon. But what reigns supreme is the succulence of an autumnal chapter which is given to us in strokes of brown embers. Ram Kumar’s landscapes have always spoken of the ancient truth that all things are in flux: the soil resonates with the cadences of a universe that, follows the life cycle of birth and death even as elements dissolve into the firmament of the annals of history.
Pictorial conventions
You feel as if you are partaking of canticles – born of an interior corollary of cultural blends. In some cases, subtle clear formations of pathways and houses look desolate and stoic. In other drawings, a sense of resilience overflows the margins when he uses thick strokes. Once to critic, theorist Ranjit Hoskote, he said, “When one is young and beginning, one’s work is dominated by content, by ideas,” he said, “but as one grows older, one turns to the language of painting itself. I have grown detached. I want to find the same peace that the mystics found.”
This show is a modernist master’s paean to the consonance of line, a personalised signatorial graphic shading and symbolism, in works spanning 50 years. Ram Kumar brings forward quasi-abstract creations in his own formulaic raphic style with approximations of aesthetic sensibility and pictorial conventions.
The words of his brother, writer Nirmal Verma come through, “History and memory become inseparable. There is something so ‘delicately disturbing’ in these paintings…” perhaps because “they evoke what we remember, creating an equivalence between memory and image.”
On view till December 31 at The Claridges, New Delhi.
