Shivaji K Panikkar reads into Ramesh Pithiya’s paintings through the ‘trouble of the closet’
Is the knowledge of the closet of any value to the world at large is one of the questions that ground and engages Ramesh Pithiya’s art. Before anything more: I definitely want to rescue Ramesh’s art from bias or vested interests, pretensions and surely also from my own over-enthusiasm. It is pertinent to state here that the artist and I have been living together, sharing a gay relationship, while mutually also involved in each other’s vocations: art making and art history. These confessions lighten our hearts greatly, not just because today it is possible to say this or because we owe the confession to the hetero-sexist world. But because living a gay man’s identity until the recent past had been, or even today is, a matter of shame, or too unworthy or dangerous (which it still is although over the past couple of decades, through collective action, the social condition for gays has indeed come a long way in enabling assertion of its presence). However, it is important to note that Ramesh and I are among the privileged few, who are quite matter of fact in our assertion of our identity and recognition, and we are forthright in accepting the fact that gayness has primarily controlled and determined our choices in life and art. But, there are so many we know who simply cannot speak-up.
To know that one’s sexual desires gush towards one’s own gender and the resulting moments of self-reckoning is a painful and troubled process. Despite the entrenched pleasure, along the line comes the unbelievability and the bizarre uncanniness about one’s sexuality; the very queer experience of it, or the ‘un-naturalness’, if labelled that way. On the other side is the value of social confessions of those who are ‘out of the closet’; the epistemology of these processes cannot be simple or dated as far as the hetero-sexist patriarchy exists to intimidate, ridicule, erase or try to oppress. Undoubtedly, these realities constantly shape the present of a man with gay preferences, since apart from the few who know, and are privileged to confess or assert–the courageous and the forthright by habit or supported by a communitarian collective–there are those numerous others for whom the closet is the way of trapped existence. However, I am not suggesting that Ramesh’s work is giving voice to those who cannot speak up. The political constrains of speaking for someone who is still in the closet is a question that is not addressed in this essay.
Largely, the above condition of gay life is what the self-trained painter (and, an art school dropout) Ramesh addresses in his medium-sized works done in different thematic serials. It is only a condition that he is trying to objectify, as he resists being labelled and thus becoming marginalised, as an exclusive painter of gay issues or identity questions, considering that life and art as a process is a matter that encompasses other concerns as well. What I am interested is in the latent gay problematic in his art; since his works suggest a reading in the direction from which emerge various questions that a situation of “out of closet” and life produces, or even conditions of the “closet” itself. Moreover, and apart from the fact that each of the works mark stages of the young artist’s steady maturing–technically, emotionally and politically–this engagement through art to Ramesh means living out life beyond the possibilities of mere survival on the capital of being queer. It signifies claiming or even exceeding the substantive meanings that art making today can lend to art makers. This consists of a demand on the world to live freely with dignity as per the imagination of a gay man, the primary condition for which is living as one determines and as per one’s own choices, which moves beyond the normative social and political patterns, stereotypes and conditions.
Ramesh believes that placing gayness in the social sphere by itself is an avant garde act and worth engaging with, which indeed is a determining fact for his artistic engagement. He recognises that the ideas of “out of the closet” and exploring much further through the medium of art has already been done by his gay predecessors, David Hockney, Bhupen Khakhar and Robert Mapplethorpe. He also takes cognisance and looks back at artists such as Jasper Johns or Andy Warhol, and understands the way they went through the trouble of the closet, and also from the point of dealing with the then dominant language of abstraction in negotiating the question of opening out of the closet. Today, things have changed in leaps as gay artists all over the world openly engage in deep explorations of various aspects, claiming affirmative liberational arguments and exploring alternative possibilities. Ramesh’s young mind sees a whole lot of new possibilities in exploring questions of identity through art from his chosen filter.
Ramesh endeavours to explore many areas of his sexual identity through displaced and seemingly disparate series of paintings. One set of his works look at the bizarre, beastly and animal-like funny aspect of human sexuality mocking at its own vanity. Painted images like that of a monkey or hybrid animals become stand-ins for wild sexual desire, and read across the nail-pierced human body speak of the self-afflicted pains and the tragedy in self reckoning. Another set of works quotes images, texts or a newspaper page, which enables Ramesh to register various seeming and supposed queer responses to them. The overlaying and juxtaposing disparate images and words also lend imaginative breadth in inscribing assertive, yet open-ended meanings. Yet, his skilled handling of the watercolor medium and the invocation of ludicrous irony through written quotations culled from well-known gay statements punctuates the relationship between text and image, while delivering meanings and subjective concerns from the over determination of realism, pragmatism and systemic singular readings.
At different times and in differing contexts, the artist had been making works based on the male body–metaphoric self-images, in a project of self-other representation within a schizophrenic splintering process while trying to smudge-off differences, enabling the monadic artist’s self to engage with a double-subjectivity in the process of becoming; auto-desiring and inscribing the erotics of self-affliction and pain in a layered upon body. These excessively sexualised images simultaneously explore a wide range of concerns, from a latent masochism to the ironically idealised masculine self-image. Thus, a certain latent narcissism, fetishisation and masochism play out the sexually immanent self of the artist, a yearning for its sublimation. He has also painted hybrid imaginary animal-plant combines, as metaphors that mix irony and humour of the hidden and ambivalent nature of human sexual being.
Currently he is engaged in a series of paintings, which tries to ironically objectify the gentleness of style, where human (sexual) violence is a contained, lurking reality that constantly threatens stability and sanity.
Ramesh believes that placing gayness in the social sphere by itself is an avant garde act and worth engaging with, which indeed is a determining fact for his artistic engagement. He recognises that the ideas of “out of the closet” and exploring much further through the medium of art has already been done by his gay predecessors, David Hockney, Bhupen Khakhar and Robert Mapplethorpe. He also takes cognisance and looks back at artists such as Jasper Johns or Andy Warhol, and understands the way they went through the trouble of the closet, and also from the point of dealing with the then dominant language of abstraction in negotiating the question of opening out of the closet. Today, things have changed in leaps as gay artists all over the world openly engage in deep explorations of various aspects, claiming affirmative liberational arguments and exploring alternative possibilities. Ramesh’s young mind sees a whole lot of new possibilities in exploring questions of identity through art from his chosen filter.
Ramesh endeavours to explore many areas of his sexual identity through displaced and seemingly disparate series of paintings. One set of his works look at the bizarre, beastly and animal-like funny aspect of human sexuality mocking at its own vanity. Painted images like that of a monkey or hybrid animals become stand-ins for wild sexual desire, and read across the nail-pierced human body speak of the self-afflicted pains and the tragedy in self reckoning. Another set of works quotes images, texts or a newspaper page, which enables Ramesh to register various seeming and supposed queer responses to them. The overlaying and juxtaposing disparate images and words also lend imaginative breadth in inscribing assertive, yet open-ended meanings. Yet, his skilled handling of the watercolor medium and the invocation of ludicrous irony through written quotations culled from well-known gay statements punctuates the relationship between text and image, while delivering meanings and subjective concerns from the over determination of realism, pragmatism and systemic singular readings.
At different times and in differing contexts, the artist had been making works based on the male body–metaphoric self-images, in a project of self-other representation within a schizophrenic splintering process while trying to smudge-off differences, enabling the monadic artist’s self to engage with a double-subjectivity in the process of becoming; auto-desiring and inscribing the erotics of self-affliction and pain in a layered upon body. These excessively sexualised images simultaneously explore a wide range of concerns, from a latent masochism to the ironically idealised masculine self-image. Thus, a certain latent narcissism, fetishisation and masochism play out the sexually immanent self of the artist, a yearning for its sublimation. He has also painted hybrid imaginary animal-plant combines, as metaphors that mix irony and humour of the hidden and ambivalent nature of human sexual being.
Currently he is engaged in a series of paintings, which tries to ironically objectify the gentleness of style, where human (sexual) violence is a contained, lurking reality that constantly threatens stability and sanity.
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