Paintings in prose
Georgina Maddox

The Vishakapatnam-based Ramesh has been fascinated and enraptured
by the poetry of these women poets because of the transgressive nature
of their acts—they all left home to wander as poet-saints, spreading their
poetry and musings on divinity.They eschewed earthly ties like marriage
in the face of great opposition often at the cost of their lives, and they
challenged notions of modesty and surrendered their conventional place
in society as ‘respectable women’ since three of them even revoked wearing
garments.
In assuming their tone and voice, Ramesh breaks gender binaries and
embraces a genderless position from which to enunciate his devotion. In
many ways one could say that each painting that Ramesh creates has so
much of himself in it, that it could well be seen as a self portrait—especially
in this body of work, and though he uses the voices of others it is really about
the self that he is speaking. Extending that logic further, one could view the
entire exhibition as a self portrait, though the artist’s actual reference to the
self portrait is a single canvas.
“For the last ten years I have been interested in impermanence, not just
of life itself but also of people. I’m fascinated by that moment of crossover
when a personality goes from being ephemeral and human to becoming
eternal and mythological,” says Ramesh.