Domains of Eco-Criticism – Siddharth Sivakumar

While upstairs, we discovered an angry young man with
an interest in western modernism, down stairs we meet a
happy old man contemplating on his own cultural moorings.
His large sculptural installation Bahuroopi and two large
canvases dominated the large central hall, through which
one entered the exhibition on the ground floor. Other works
were thematically distributed in the other two rooms. As one
turned left from this room one encountered the Birth of the
Palash Tree, wherein we saw the artist as a kinnara painting
the world into existence. This theme is taken up in his other
paintings as well. In his Self-Portrait of Artist as Creator
with a peacock by his side, and flowers and a rainbow in
his hands, a potbellied Ramachandran colours the universe.
In paintings such as Bed of Arrows or Dyana Chitra with
Trimurthis Ramachandran is seen in a thoughtful trance,
and from his belly button, through an umbilical lotus cord
a new cosmos assumes shape. These images, pregnant with
allusions to Brahma and the creation of the universe, look
at artist as creator, more quizzically. Some of his smaller
sculptures too convey a similar message.
The room on the right was devoted to the theme of the
lotus pond. On its walls were large lotus paintings and in
the middle of the room was a sculpture of a baby in buffed
bronze lying on a large lotus leaf with deep green patina,
titled Embryonic Form on Lotus Leaf. The sculpture was
placed upon a sheet of glass that reflected the paintings hung
on the walls, such as Lotus Pond After the Rain and Lotus
Pond at Dusk. And as the spectators moved around the room
they could see the buoyant infant floating on different tides,
sailing across the reflected lotus ponds. Evidently, while
Thanatos governed the first floor, Eros, the essence of life
and creation, overwhelmed the spectators below. However,
in the most vibrant of his lotus ponds there are shrivelled
leaves, bowing like old men before death. His mythical
universe is not devoid of pain or decadence as it mirrors
human life, but to a viewer blinded by beauty, his vocabulary
may appear to be limited. In this lotus room, the artistic
unity of the works enter a multidimensional sphere, where
mediums hinge onto each other not only as an extension of
Ramachandran’s mythical world, but also as a mythical world
populated by the spectator’s movements and imagination.
The way this interplay of images and the multi-figure
sculptural groups animated the exhibition space revealed
something of an installational outlook in Ramachandran.
About Yayati, R.Sivakumar, who has written the catalogue
and curated the show says, “When Yayati was first shown,
Ramachandran arranged the painted panels not in a
continuous sequence along a wall, but presented them as