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Lot Essay
Ram Kumar's paintings are not always naturalistic representations of the mountains, fields or sky. Rather, they are more conceptual and abstracted in thought, where the artist has imbibed his visual surroundings and then proceeds to recreate these on the canvas as a combination of reality and his own individual memories and experiences.
"Whenever I see a Ram Kumar painting, and a landscape, I get the feeling that I have been there before. The manner in which memory functions through deliberate recall and association. The very forms of composition suggest that. The hard and the soft, the tangible and the elusive, the structure and the sensation. The structure of what lies before the eyes and the sensation of what lies behind. This is the link between the painter's self and our own." (Richard Bartholomew, Ram Kumar, New Delhi, Gallery Chanakya, 1973, p. 124.)
"Ram Kumar translates the landscape into a system of lines, planes, blocks; their machine-edged logic, entering into dialogue with texture and tone, governs the distribution of significant masses over the picture space. Bridges, spires, landslides, peaks: all these motifs, besides being signposts to Ram Kumar's private itinerary, play a part in binding each painting together as a mobile yet always coherent composition." (Ranjit Hoskote, 'The Poet of the Visionary Landscape', Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi, 1996, p. 38.)
"Whenever I see a Ram Kumar painting, and a landscape, I get the feeling that I have been there before. The manner in which memory functions through deliberate recall and association. The very forms of composition suggest that. The hard and the soft, the tangible and the elusive, the structure and the sensation. The structure of what lies before the eyes and the sensation of what lies behind. This is the link between the painter's self and our own." (Richard Bartholomew, Ram Kumar, New Delhi, Gallery Chanakya, 1973, p. 124.)
"Ram Kumar translates the landscape into a system of lines, planes, blocks; their machine-edged logic, entering into dialogue with texture and tone, governs the distribution of significant masses over the picture space. Bridges, spires, landslides, peaks: all these motifs, besides being signposts to Ram Kumar's private itinerary, play a part in binding each painting together as a mobile yet always coherent composition." (Ranjit Hoskote, 'The Poet of the Visionary Landscape', Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi, 1996, p. 38.)