From A Bucket Of Photographs To Paintings That Keep Their Secrets, V. Ramesh On Art And Meaning

"What does it mean?" V. Ramesh has been asked this more times than he can count, and he says it with the gentle weariness of a man who has watched the same door being knocked on for decades. "People are so obsessed with the idea that, when they come to a painting, the first thing they ask an artist is, 'What does it mean?'" he tells me. "As if the artist were to tell them what it means, some magic box would open and they would understand everything." His answer is the most useful advice I have received about looking at art in a long time and that is to stand before it and let it reveal its secret and magic to you slowly.

I had come to speak to Ramesh about Sacred Spaces, an exhibition spanning several decades of his work at the Bikaner House in Delhi. But within minutes, the conversation had moved beyond than a curator's note. It had become a meditation on why we look, why we long, and what happens in the quiet after the explanation runs out.

A Retrospective That Isn't About the Past

Ramesh lives and works in Visakhapatnam, the landscape that also shaped his earliest canvases, populated by fishermen, the sea and the land itself. Today, his paintings turn towards devotional poets and the places, stories and traces they have left behind. On paper, it reads like a considerable shift. To him it is less a departure than a continuation of the same search.

"Sometimes, even with artists or with myself, it is very revelatory when I look at a whole body of work that I have done over a period of time," he says. "You feel that you have moved away from certain things to certain other things." Then comes the twist. What stayed put, he says, is the preoccupation: "the search for that truth which underlies everything. A search for life around us and to question it as to why it is what it is."

The imagery, in other words, has simply changed its costume. "It has just taken different avatars, if I may use the word, over the years."

The change on the surface is real, though. Earlier figures had a sculptural heft, a physical solidity. Now they are looser, more linear and almost provisional. This is a deliberate philosophical choice and not a drift in technique. "The whole world is in a state of flux," Ramesh explains. "To perhaps give a fixed notion of what a thing is or should be in a work is perhaps not really right." His figures now seem to be caught mid-moment, forever shifting, and the effect is tender, as though the painter has stopped pretending that anything holds still.

Bridal Mysticism And The Courage To Be Moved 

The heart of Sacred Spaces is a group of works inspired by the bhakti poets of the seventh and eighth centuries, whose longing for the divine was so total it spilled into the language of romance. Ramesh points to what scholars call bridal mysticism, where even a male poet might address God as a lover, as a bride waiting at the door.

What fascinates him is not the theology. It is the temperature. "It is not just about longing for something," he says. "It is also this deep desire to create a state of deep emotional ecstasy, and that interests me."

He is careful, almost stubborn, about vocabulary here. He avoids the word God altogether because "it has multiple connotations." What he chases is "that elusive thing called truth of existence." And he is candid about his own plan going wrong, which I loved. He began the series intending to illustrate the poets' stories, a straightforward act of retelling. Somewhere along the way, the paintings refused. "Eventually, it turned out to be a kind of intense emotional pictorial spaces which I have created, and not just mere illustrations."

Then he says something that stayed with me long after I put down my phone. Songs and poems move us to tears all the time, he observes. Paintings almost never do. "One is kind of astounded at the skill or anything else, but it does not move you to tears. I have always wondered about that." The ambition underlying Sacred Spaces is to close that gap.

Bucket And First Stories

Ask most artists for an origin story and you get a lightning bolt. Ramesh gives you a bucket of water.

His father was an engineer and an amateur photographer who turned the family bathroom into a makeshift darkroom at night. In the mornings, young Ramesh would stumble in to brush his teeth and find photographs floating in the bucket, images surfacing out of nothing. "For me, it was pure magic," he recalls. "That was my first experience of realising the potential of how images can actually move someone."

The second ingredient was a grandmother who told stories, and told them, he says, with "great intelligence and an ability to draw a child's attention." Those tales, he suspects were converted in his young mind into pictures. Decades on, he still thinks of himself less as a painter than as a storyteller.  "Telling stories is also a way of sharing our concerns with another person."

It is a lovely detail that the man now painting poets from the seventh century learned his craft from a grandmother at the dinner hour.

Devotion, Memory And The Stain That Remembers

Ask Ramesh about memory and he does not reach for nostalgia. He tells you about a technical experiment.

As a student, he was frightened of watercolour. It is unforgiving as it allows no painting over, no rescuing a muddy patch. Once he was an established painter, he decided to confront it, but sideways. He began screen-printing with watercolour and then washing the image off almost immediately, leaving behind only a faint stain on the paper.

"And that, to me, was like a faint memory of things, of recollection," he says. The longer the print sat, the stronger the ghost became, and he would build the image up from there. It is a lovely, almost palimpsest-like process, where the picture is made of what was nearly erased.

Here is where Ramesh surprised me most. I had assumed that a painter of Bhakti poets would hold a rather pious view of devotion, and that a younger audience might find it remote. He dismissed the premise at once: "I would think that is a very wrong concept, a misconception."

Devotion, for him, is not a God-fearing posture or a bhajan circle. It is a spirit of enquiry. "The idea of devotion is also understanding life and the interconnectedness of it.. We seem to be separate on the surface, but underneath there is a connection. And to enquire into that connection is what devotion implies for me."

It can be a landscape that makes you feel something larger than yourself. It can be a piece of music that brings tears. It can be a stranger's unexpected kindness. And he pre-empts any halo being placed above his head: "I am certainly not some kind of saintly person."

Beyond The Noise

Ours is an art world of fairs, feeds and fast-moving installations, and I asked how he sees it. His response was more philosophical than defensive. He declines to pass judgement on where the world is heading, but he keeps one anchor.

Years ago, before he left a science degree and went off to study finance, he told himself that if he could only paint all his life, he would be the happiest person alive. So when despair arrives, as it does for almost every artist, he runs a simple test. "You are painting every day. You are painting what you want to do. You are painting the way you want to do it. Can there be a happier moment than this? No." He understands that art fairs are also about business, but if the art itself is not connecting, “the rest is irrelevant.”

He is also unexpectedly hopeful. He sees young people questioning the status quo and going against the grain, despite the pressures of social media. “That is, I would say, the light in the darkness,” he says. When I ask what still brings him back to the canvas, his answer is immediate: “It does, every morning.” A blank canvas, he says, still excites him with its “possibilities.” He finds inspiration in something much simpler too like his evening walks. He watches people, animals and the world around him, the same kind of people-watching that I find myself drawn to. “It is so meditative, honestly. And I feel calm.”

As our conversation wound down, he signed off with a warmth that was hard to resist. "So that is that, my dear child." I left feeling as though I had been told a story by someone's grandfather, which, given everything he had just said about where stories come from, felt exactly right. Sacred Spaces is not an exhibition that wants to be decoded. It wants to be sat with. Ramesh extended me a personal invitation to come and look, and I will extend it to you. Go without the question. Let the work do the rest.

Sacred Spaces by V. Ramesh is on view at CCA, Bikaner House, New Delhi, from 9th to 17th October 2026.