Inspiration derives from infinite sources, winding its way through the conscious and sub-levels of consciousness. Like the skeins of silk woven as a tapestry, or the hues combined to congeal as a ‘colour’, the imagery unfolding across a picture plane is divergent and often unpredictable. Nevertheless, environment and snatches of refrain do infect and affect and effect an artist’s renderings. Since his recent move to Delhi, no doubt the motifs and concepts with which Ramesh Terdal has been working have changed. He must be wary of the overly stated import of ...

Inspiration derives from infinite sources, winding its way through the conscious and sub-levels of consciousness. Like the skeins of silk woven as a tapestry, or the hues combined to congeal as a ‘colour’, the imagery unfolding across a picture plane is divergent and often unpredictable. Nevertheless, environment and snatches of refrain do infect and affect and effect an artist’s renderings. Since his recent move to Delhi, no doubt the motifs and concepts with which Ramesh Terdal has been working have changed. He must be wary of the overly stated import of such motifs, to use them rather than the reverse…… in this current series which coincides with his shift in 2007, which he acknowledges to have certainly affected him both as an individual and as an artist.

An earlier exhibition, Pages from my Diary (Bangalore, 2005) reveals a sustained devolution into textural work, primarily in terms of background elements. However, the work was definitively prosaic, the tableaux slightly naïve and the subjects bucolic. In between these stages of work, another series merged the figural corporal delineation with abstract colour fields and slightly dreamy surrealist shapes. The artist concurrently blended geometric forms with kinetic strokes, as wall as iconographic objects.

From these precedent forays, Terdal has arrived at a contemporary take on his own modular contemporary representative work. Still working with similar strokes, but the urban and popular subject matter has led his brush towards a different exemplar. Unlike many of present-day artists who combine these themes with multi-media techniques, led of course by the overwhelming embrace of digital media, Terdal merely paints. His brush fibres emit from his fingers, with occasional spray features.

Upon first glance, many of the characters/caricatures inhabiting his canvases are far too familiar. The torch-held high iconic Statue of liberty, the repeated motif of revolver-pistol-handgun…repeated forms be they human or nature morte. Words are stencilled along vertical and horizontal planes. They comment without over dominating the visual imagery. Images of collage effects of 20th century painters like the Neo-Dadaist Robert Rauschenberg (deceased 2008) come to mind, attributed statements through mirror image and an embrace of popular spirit and emotions with historical remnants and memorabilia. Lexicons of timeless symbols collected and reconfigured to profess the concerns, the sentiments of the artist.

Dr. Carl G. Jung's theory of inspiration reiterated the other side of the Romantic notion of inspiration indirectly by suggesting that an artist is one who was attuned to something impersonal, something outside of the individual experience: racial memory. Jung's artist is the one best able to feel and express the conflict between the "shadow" primitive and the civilized ego and to encode the archetypes of the human mind. Thus, again, inspiration came from a kind of deeper awareness, as these memories were present in all persons (thereby accounting for recognition of the archetypes and memories when viewing artwork), but only the artistic spirit could receive such inspiration/memory. Those artists who followed Jung's thought put an emphasis on primitivism and the study of pre-literate art and myth (from the preface to C.G. Jung, Man and his Symbols, 1964).

In a recent BBC reportage on stupendously sized sculpture in public spaces (Chatsworth), the sculptor Richard Serra commented on the role of art to contract or expand time, to speak to and round about the minds of the viewers. Terdal’s

work bespeaks these omnipresent subjects, yet brings a gentler twist to the visions of violence, chaos, terrorism, consumption, and the like. No doubt his embrace of a personal journey through which to expose the underbelly (consider the confronting image of a foetus inside the womb facing a man with upraised fist in the piece enitled Don’t look Outside), and invert the veneer of shifting societal paradigms encourages him to seize his metaphors from his environs.

Terdal writes of how “passion is interbuilt with once day to day life”. His paintings reflect the juxtaposition of the individual and society, of the private and public arenas, the stasis of the fine line between peace and chaos. An ever-oscillating rollercoaster of the journey of life. His figures are static and alive at once. As was written of earlier works by the artist, there emerges a sort of subtle nostalgia, he does not preach, but a sense of imbalance or balance weaving at the edge of a chasm confronts the mind’s eye. In the work, Which Side are You? (note the Hinglish words), the left side of the diptych beholds a meditative head of Buddha, while on the right side, a bald male head in profile is wreathed with black guns. One must question the thoughts behind the full-frontal laughing face of another painting, not a sneering but an ear-to-ear expression which the artist considers to be pleasure or happiness. Other pieces consider shifting lifestyles, postures and interrelations. Are politics and art separable? These subjects permeate lives, but they require the original vision of an artist to transcend the mere visual media. Nevertheless, should they stir minds to perceive diverse pathways, then they have journeyed from the individual to a whole.

These works peruse [the artificial entities] of a life or lives, as pervasive as they are or can be. What is real or subsumed? It shall be interesting to watch the next stages of Terdal’s personal forays into imagery and his reactions to the world around him.

Elizabeth Rogers

New Delhi