About
If a certain notion of contemporaneity be the yardstick, then the visual configurations from Ramu Das would fit in seamlessly with critical expectations by virtue of their linguistic possibilities. Ramu's pictorial expressions add up to a neatly complete presentation - wit, humour, sarcasm, pun and allegory - all rolled into a single package, and it is this that characterizes the basic structure of Ramu Das's pictorial statements. What becomes gradually evident as one looks on at these images, is the fact that these images are potentially multi-layered, and therefore, complex as visual commentaries. Such layered pronouncements are sometimes voiced extremely directly, such that the viewer does not run any risk of escaping even a fragment of the initial intention that went into the formation of the image. At other instances the painter would play diligently with his forms and colors, to deliver a complex statement that purposefully leaves open ends for a successful interpretative engagement by a thoughtful onlooker, who must begin from that initial bewilderment resulting out of a bizarre configuration, and work one's way around towards the decoding of that which has been presented.
Originally hailing from a remote village near Balurghat in North Bengal, Ramu joined Kala Bhavan, the institute of fine arts at Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, for a graduate and post-graduate course in painting. This training was significant, for it gave him a clear conception regarding the 'modern' - both in the western as well as Indian context - and familiarized him with diverse contemporary manifestations of mainstream visual art practice. It also equipped him with the tools and strategies of contextualizing his practice as a significant mode of visual expression within the currently popular trajectories of cultural discourse. It effectively prepared him towards actualizing that which he aspired for.
Ramu is gifted with keen observation - he observes closely the life around, the varied aspects of society, man and the art produced by other artists. Consequently, he sets himself into an initial monologue of grim seriousness, but the resultant of which, in contradistinction, often ends up charged with the liberating elements of wit, humour and fantasy. His thematic concerns, as exemplified in his paintings, are mostly centred around the various aspects of human social behaviour - resolution and contradiction between individual human aspirations and the collective of the society at large; the advocacy for (or against) technology, the negotiations of sexuality most usually suppressed through normative behavioural codes-of-conduct imposed by civil society, and similar struggles within and between the individual and the group.
These thematic concerns are articulated through a relationally connected visual language - one that developed as an eclectic vehicle or carrier of the content. To a certain extent Ramu's vocabulary may be classified as naturalistic, but when that naturalist appearance is made to transmute through to other dimensions of expression, there are visible pointers towards a creative distortion that crosses over and beyond the limits of that which can be articulated through the purely naturalistic language. Elements of realism are thereby juxtaposed with surreal propositions, themes and subjects picked up from immediate locale are forged through the anvil of symbolism, recalling a similar way in which the early modernists of the 1970s attempted to spell out a new mode of expression - however, in terms of the specificity of imagery and vocabulary, Ramu is certainly a manifestation of his contextual and immediate present. Symbolism becomes apparent at times, for instance, when the form of the conch is projected as a suggestion of female sexuality, or a mechanized toy animal suggests the operation of forces from a technocratic society, and the modes through which such forces invariably and continuously impinge upon the everyday existence and psychological framework of the so-called 'common' man.
Ramu is a painter with considerable consistency and a maturity of technical skill. However, he is unswayed by the lure of multimedia in his own practice and has opted till date to operate from within the domain of 'pure' painting in the media of oil-on-canvas and acrylic paint. This choice is also related to the position that he adopts towards technique - a conventional and sometimes puritanic conformation to traditional modes and methods, where he prefers not to align with trendy and recent deviations for the sake of a novel difference. His faithful adherence to traditional modes is so paramount that he displays no zeal for the experimental, and resists untrodden paths. Instead, he concentrates on in-depth exploration of possibilities within the chosen medium.
The luminous in Ramu Das's visual configurations arise primarily out of the brilliant passages of rich pigment. However, there are paintings which are based on a distinctly different choice of colours - that of pastel shades - and the pictorial essays based on bright yellows, greens, pinks, reds and blues add a different note of the visually exotic. Ramu has an eye for details; and this manifests in the details of texture, surface and design, which are meticulously worked out by the artist and form a distinctly primary characteristic in his pictorial language.
Ramu's use of animal forms is in alignment with his attitude towards the elements of wit and humour in his personal expression. Thus, the chameleon, the tiger or the crocodile take on their respective shapes in the composition to aid the expressive potential of the pun or the allegoric allusion coded within the painted image through such juxtaposition of forms. While the shape of the conch is employed to symbolize female sexuality, the conjunction of a butterfly seated on a conch could symbolically refer to sexuality of the opposite gender,
As an artist of the present generation, Ramu has a conscious approach towards the pictorial images from artists of earlier eras. And his response ranges widely from iconic paintings of Edouard Manet to those closer home, for instance, Benode Behari Mukherjee and Jogen Chowdhury. As he adopts elements, forms or figures from these works he also re-contextualizes them within a transformed and new content specific to his own composition. Thereby, these adoptions do not result in mere imitation, but reinterpretations through quotation, such that the final result evokes the essence of the contemporary.
In the oil-on-canvas titled Good morning, the recurrent characteristics of Ramu's pictorial diction can be clearly read - brilliant tones of bright hue jostle for attention, as the fine naturalistic details in the foliage, textile and the drapes create a resonant textural impact. However, in contradistinction, there appears to be something queer or comical about the human presence. The couple evidently display the essence of a morning, one holding onto their pet dog while simultaneously brushing his teeth, as she strums on a guitar albeit subtle overnight disarray in her hair and dress. Over and above the neatness of pose and preciseness of rendering, it is the overall naïve element in the pictorial language that transforms an otherwise perfect rendering of sharing the early moments of a new day into a critique of sophisticated urban behavioural pattern.
Ramu extends his leaning towards an attempted symbolism in an untitled painting depicting a reclining form of a human figure apparently trapped within the roots and branches of a double-tree. As the flowering branches on both sides of the central circle that holds the figure recreate a beautiful world that is at the same time dangerous, the superimposed flamboyant chair translates the iconic image into a statement of being ensnared within struggles for power. Elsewhere, in Olympia bathing, Ramu transforms Manet's painting into a reinterpreted though decontextualised new icon that is distinct though related to its original inception. Relocating the nude woman in a bath tub, with her body covered with tattoo, either actually or inscribed symbolically, and the whole place in conjunction with elements of equally surreal implications, the initial impressionist image has been sufficiently transmuted to a different plane altogether. As the part-ferocious feline perches on a suspended cowrie shell, held up by strings with a pink drape flowing down from beneath it, the camouflaged agenda of sexuality operates blatantly through the device of the return gaze, as the painted female body stares directly out at the viewer. Alluringly converted in the artist's imagination into an object of male erotic fantasy, the female body serves a role in this painting that is quite a few shades different from the painting it quotes as reference.
Related to this image would be Ramu's reworking of Manet's "Déjeuner sur l'herbe" or "Luncheon on the grass" into an untitled painting. The accompanying pair of men have been endowed with distinctly indigenous identities, as the confluence between the erotic and the categories of violence and terrorism render the image potent with layered interpretations different from the original context. Grenades and rifles, the threatening gesture of a double finger assertion, and the grafting of an automobile onto a helicopter, work together with the silhouette of a recognizable architecture such that despite the echoes to the image it draws upon, this painting aspires to be potent with political commentaries. The last example would directly lead on to another untitled painting depicting a smiling man carrying a sack full of grenades in the same posture that one would perhaps be carrying vegetables to the market. The smiling countenance works like a disguised sarcasm, and the artist defines his intention as a response to recent political situation in the region and the helplessness that one feels amidst it. The sunny ambience, the brilliant and rich tones of colour and the delectable softness of the pastel shades in the background landscape come in sharp contrast to the tree, the human form and the foreground elements. On the other hand, Justice by a tiger is a metaphoric tale about the curse of a technological world. Here the recurrent motif of the cowrie shell resting on a pink drape occupies the focal centre of the image, both in terms of compositional structure as well as thematic implication, while the transformation in the powerful beast turned beast of burden gains a unique dimension by virtue of the fact that the animal is in reality nothing more than a shell. The split body reveals inner mechanical devices such as the spiral spring-like object that replaces the intestinal parts, but this also effectively leads the viewer on to contemplate upon the loss of potential power in natural protest against the opposing forces of disruptive socio-political violence. Deceived villager is a close twin to this painting, as rural innocence is led on to wonder at the seemingly grand urban control over apparently ferocious forces - only when one realizes the split divide in the body of the animal revealing a mechanical emptiness, does the impact of that power fizzle out into non-existence.
In Artist's fingers, Ramu plays around the same element of violence and peace as his meditating Buddha himself sits disguised like a militant who dons a combat-camouflage dress. But in Laugh now, Ramu moves closer to the confluence of fantasy and the real, as the tactile rendering of the animal and the man gradually take on the artificial numbness of synthetic appearances. Finally in Springtime, Ramu turns towards early modern Indian art, to Benode Behari Mukherjee's "Tree lover", recasting the protagonist as an identifiable personality from the artist's immediate ambience, and shifting the semantic implication to different planes through the surreal impact of cowrie shells hanging from the branches of the tree.
In all these images, Ramu Das walks a tightrope between the garish world of posters, the caustic colours of commercial visuals and the critique of the mechanical as revealed in the themes. It is his conscious adoption of the expressive potential of naïve pictorial language and the harnessing of it that achieves the desired impact in these paintings.
Nandini Ghosh
[Nandini Ghosh is an independent art historian and writer. She holds a PhD in Art History from the M.S. University of Baroda, and has taught at the various art institutions in Kolkata and Burdwan. Her essays have appeared regularly in reputed national art journals.]
