V Ramesh’s work captures the sacred in the everyday

“I feel that my concerns, or what preoccupies me, have remained essentially the same over the past 40 years,” he says. His fishermen inhabited the margins between sea and land and, for him, “between life and death”. The later paintings ask much the same thing in another language: what is existence and how real is the physical world?

A crucial change came after a visit to the Ramana Ashram at Tiruvannamalai in Tamil Nadu in 1998. In its library, Ramesh encountered women devotional poets from different parts of India, separated by geography and centuries but connected by strikingly similar experiences. They left their homes, wandered and wrote openly about their lives. Their radicalism interested him as much as their faith.

For Visakhapatnam-based artist V Ramesh, the sacred does not necessarily begin at the entrance to a temple.

But devotion for Ramesh is very different from organised religion, a distinction that has acquired greater urgency for him. “We are living through a time when organised religion is frequently used as an excuse to justify the many acts that are, in fact, deeply inhuman,” he says. “True devotion is something that binds you to another human being.” For him, bhakti is ultimately about recognising a shared humanity. “In a way, true devotion leads to complete freedom.”

This also explains his interest in figures who challenged convention. His engagement with Nandanar, the Dalit saint denied access to temples, is inevitably complicated by caste and exclusion. Ramesh sees his story as one of “determination to achieve something against all odds”. He first responded to songs from a Tamil opera about Nandanar. “Though I don’t understand Tamil well, the songs moved me and I felt that his story needs to be told.” Another recurring presence is Arunachala, the mountain inseparable from Ramana Maharshi. Ramesh remembers attempting to climb it in 2006 and getting stranded on a granite boulder when the weather suddenly changed. “I genuinely thought I was going to die there.”

He eventually made his way down, but the mountain has never left him. Even now, its silhouette affects him whenever he approaches it. “I have never tried to rationalise that feeling,” he says. “I have simply allowed myself to be moved by the sight of the hill, by its visual presence.”

The new watercolours bring that search for the sacred much closer home. Ironically, watercolour was once a medium Ramesh avoided because he found it difficult. His relationship with it changed during his 2008 exhibition ‘White Clouds’, when he began screen-printing with watercolour, washing it away and reworking the paper.

He discovered a medium particularly suited to memory. “Watercolour can be like a stream or a memory. You can apply it, rub it off, wipe it away, and yet a trace of it remains on the paper.” The objects appearing in these works come from his studio and home — things he encounters every day.

And that ordinariness leads to the central question of ‘Sacred Spaces’: what actually makes something sacred? “I feel it is not the object itself. Sacredness lies within us,” Ramesh says. In the new works, the empty space around an object becomes crucial, creating an aura without turning the object itself into an icon.

The thought extends far beyond religion. A museum, he points out, is ultimately a building with walls; its aura comes from how things are placed, encountered and understood. “In that sense, the whole world is sacred: the landscape, the trees, the seas, and we human beings ourselves.”

Perhaps that is where Ramesh’s fishermen, mystics, mountains and humble domestic objects finally meet. The sacred, these paintings suggest, is not necessarily somewhere we go. It may be something we learn to see.