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Lot Essay
Ram Kumar began his romance with the landscape on his first visit to Varanasi in 1960. Since then, the landscape has remained the artist's focus over the last four decades, though his images and interpretations have undergone several changes.
In his works from the 1980s, it is the movement in the canvas that captures the viewer; "as if all that was arrested and frozen until now, has been 'touched' by some unknown god who by releasing its bonds makes it free and lets it flow in its own momentum." (Nirmal Verma, 'From Solitude to Salvation', Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi, 1996, p. 26.) There is a move from larger, relatively flat expanses of color to a more fractured pictorial surface where the image is created from shorter, jagged strokes with the palette knife that come together to form the final image.
"His 'abstractions' are not flights into the 'unknown', but like a shifting beam of light they move, passing through the entire space of the painting, from one segment of reality to another, uncovering the hidden relations, between the sky, the rock, the river. The sacred resides not in the objects depicted, but in the relations discovered." (Nirmal Verma, op. cit., p. 27.)
In his works from the 1980s, it is the movement in the canvas that captures the viewer; "as if all that was arrested and frozen until now, has been 'touched' by some unknown god who by releasing its bonds makes it free and lets it flow in its own momentum." (Nirmal Verma, 'From Solitude to Salvation', Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi, 1996, p. 26.) There is a move from larger, relatively flat expanses of color to a more fractured pictorial surface where the image is created from shorter, jagged strokes with the palette knife that come together to form the final image.
"His 'abstractions' are not flights into the 'unknown', but like a shifting beam of light they move, passing through the entire space of the painting, from one segment of reality to another, uncovering the hidden relations, between the sky, the rock, the river. The sacred resides not in the objects depicted, but in the relations discovered." (Nirmal Verma, op. cit., p. 27.)