Ratheesh T

(The Times of India Crest Edition, April 9, 2011)

Sometimes you look at a work of art and wonder whether you haven’t wandered off into your own nightmares. Sometimes you see strange apparitions that could only have come off a medieval woodcut that spoke of demonic rituals and unholy desires. Sometimes you can wonder if you are really on the same plane, physical of psychical, as you explore visually, strangely disturbed by the images, but unable to move away from them. Such it is with the work of Ratheesh T, often described as magic realism, the genre so evocatively and expertly channelled by literary greats like Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude) and Leslie Marmon Silko (Ceremony) and in art by Paul Cadmus and George Tooker. In India, OV Vijayan’s Malayalam prose captures the essence of fantasy in the highest quality of language, presenting a stunning series of word-pictures that seem, in a strange way, to find reflection in what Ratheesh creates. His works are, on the surface, highly detailed and astonishingly intricate; as you look closer, the spooky element comes to the fore, leaping off the large oil-daubed canvases to smack you in the eye, metaphorically speaking, of course, with a certain unnerving sense of horror, of weirdness, of a realm where fantasy and horror collide in a parallel universe that does nothing to soothe rattled senses.

Ratheesh T was born in Kilimanoor in Kerala in 1980 and lives and works in Tiruvananthapuram, from where he earned a BFA at the College of Fine Arts. He started exhibiting early, with works at the Kerala Lalithkala Academy in Kochi in 2003, and has shown in prestigious galleries and fora in the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom. His involvement and empathy with his art shows in his responses to questions, thoughtful, passionate, occasionally incoherent, but loquacious, his eyes gleaming with a strangely otherworldly excitement though his spectacles as he speaks in a heavy Malayali accent. His recent show at the Galerie Mirchandani-Steinrucke in Mumbai, a preview to an exhibition including his works in Berlin, is called Green Pond and is indicative of the predominant colour in his works. As he explains with characteristic enthusiasm, “it comes naturally...it just comes”

There is a lot of green used, something that has been commented on before. Does this stem from your background in Kerala, or the channeling of nature as the main focus of your thought processes?
That is a good question. My paintings have a lot of green, my studio space is surrounded by green so it comes naturally, I do not think about it. One painting I made in Scotland is very brown...it comes to one, it just comes.

‘Magic realism’ is a phrase oft-used to describe your work. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a master of the art in writing. How would you, the artist, explain this concept of magic realism in the context of your work?
People think about it as magic realism, but my ideas come from real life, from the heart. How do we create a total feel? That is very important. As an artist, I will do anything, go in any direction to achieve my purpose of getting this total ‘feel’. In my self portrait there are snakes inside my brain - now that is not only a snake; somebody may think ‘only snakes’, but for me it is showing the complexities of its body and powerfulness of its head. Also, it tells the story of the history of the snake in India - Krishna sleeping on a snake, Shiva wearing a snake...it all relates to power, the power of God, or in my case, the power of the brain. Magic realism is other people's issue, it is not my issue.

At first look, the work is full of life, of energy, vibrant, positive. As you look deeper, there is a certain sense of darkness, an underlying evil almost, that comes through. Is that a reflection of life today or a comment on it?
Peripherally, we can say that there are so many images of that kind. But deeply, underneath the peripheral, if you go into any detail, you will find abstraction of the universal - in life and looking at it, everything appears peripheral when one sees what I am doing on the canvas. But that is not the right way of looking...
First, when we are looking at the canvas, we get the total feel, the first impression. Only after that do we notice details, we walk to and then into the details. That is going towards another way to discover the truth.

How do you do your work – the paintings are so complex, so detailed, so intricate – where do the ideas come from? Is there any method with which they are executed? And is this complexity the reason you do not show that much in Mumbai?
Much of it comes from my love and admiration for my mother. My birth into my family is a great gift. This birth - where I was born, when I was born - each and every idea comes from this, it is my gift. An artist is born. Some paintings take less time and are less complicated, like Memory and Mother Goddess; others take very, very long.

What are you, the artist, attempting to communicate to your audience?
What I try to make is total energy of real spirituality, that which is inside me. This has nothing to do with religion's God, but everything to do with energy.

It has been said by critics and essayists that you are making trenchant comments on the issues that matter today – could you explain that?
Everything is positioned on the landscape and the landscape sometimes answers back when you ask questions. I am also on the landscape all the time, so I am too close to it, I cannot say much about it. Instead, I paint.