To see contemporary art so unapologetically borrowing from an ‘older' style is a little unusual — unusual to the extent that K.N. Ramachandran's impressionistic series ‘The Market Scenes of Bangalore' almost seems an anachronism in an art world peppered with the fashionably experimental and abstract.
With his distinct attention to colour over detail, Ramachandran's exhibition at the Vinnyasa Premier Art Galery calls to mind the work of the early French Impressionists, who ignored the constraints of line and rejected loftier subjects to portray the more ‘ordinary' landscapes of life. Blurring line and colour with unrestrained brushstrokes like the Impressionists before him, Ramachandran's paintings convey an impression of the scenes he depicts, rather than creating a mimetic or ‘accurate' representation of scenes themselves.
The converging and diverging flicks of Ramachandran's brush sprinkle his marketscapes with colourful clusters of fruits, flowers and vegetables. As if fighting to spill over the borders of the canvas, almost every work in this series brims with these images of vibrant fecundity — a woman carries a basket of fruit over her head, her sensuously curving belly visible where her sari gapes; another is seated amidst a mass of flowers and fruit; a third, sits before a kaleidoscopic array of bangles, a young child on her lap.
Unlike his French predecessors who marched with their easels to paint en plein air (outdoors), Ramachandran paints largely from memory. Instead of capturing the moment as perceived through the eye, he paints his impression of the moment as it presents itself later in memory: “These are scenes he sees every day” says curator and gallery owner Viji Nagashwaran. “He doesn't go and sit out there with his easel. These are images from his mind of things he sees regularly. ‘Photomemories', you could say.”
Ramachandran's series seems to situate itself in a position between the immediate perception of an image and one's later recollection of it. Perhaps contrary to what may come to mind if you were asked to visualise a market, the exhibition portrays a tranquil and seemingly peaceful picture: figures look serenely up from the canvas, held between striations of paint in the idylls of the artist, the foreground bold and vivid whilst the colours of the background drain to monochrome shadows — like the dim fringes of a fading memory.
The exhibition will be on view at the Vinnyasa Premier Art Galery until November 25 (11a.m.-7 p.m.).
