A painter who depicts the ironies of the life around

Ram Kumar’s paintings express the desolation or sense of loss he witnessed in the life around him. A leading name from India’s modern art movement, he is renowned for his ephemeral landscapes.He was greatly inspired by its mystical imagery of day-to-day life in Varanasi. When he first went there almost five decades ago, he felt a haunting sense of hopelessness and desolation in the dimly lit, deserted lanes of a dark night.

The starkness of this haunting experience only grew with every subsequent trip to the holy city. These impressions marked a major transition in his thought process and practice. The young painter spent hours at the riveting riverbanks engulfed by a vast sea of humanity. The wary faces with a prayer on their lips seemed like masks that bore marks of sufferings similar to the creaky windows and doors jutting out of old structures.

Seeing the lifeless bodies brought from distant villages, awaiting their turn for liberation, he felt the fading boundary between life and death. The somber sight left a lasting imprint on his artistic sensibility. Gradually, a new visual idiom arose from the depths of an introspective experience.

Analyzing Ram Kumar’s growth trajectory, art critic Ranjit Hoskote has noted in an essay: "He spent the first decade of India's independence, perfecting an elegiac figuration imbued with the spirit of tragic modernism. To this period belong those lost souls: the monumental Picassoesque figures packed into a darkened picture-womb, terrorized workers, emaciated doll-women and the bewildered clerks trapped in the industrial city. Rendered through a semi-cubist discipline and memorialized, these fugitives are trapped in a hostile environment and in their own divided selves."

The extreme irony in the life around reflects in his paintings. If his Benares series is a haunting meditation on death, the landscape paintings focus on brighter side of life. The vibrant colors and shimmering surfaces exude a sense of restless vitality.