Rameshwar Broota is an artist whose works are difficult to straitjacket in a particular genre. His works can appear surreal because of the heightened depiction of the figures and the detailing of the human form, be it rendering of the veins or hair on the body, but then they are not. The paintings are not fantastical but relate to the world around us and capture nuances and minor details of human existence; they make you introspective. Adding to this feeling is the fact that his works are in sepia tones, a semblance of past times, bringing a sense of calm and silence.
In addition to the subjects of his artworks, there are two more, almost dichotomous, reasons as to why we are engulfed in this silence - his technique and the scale. One would imagine that when an artist uses a large-scale format it expresses something that has many elements, be it abstract or figurative, that it would be a high energy painting and would overwhelm our senses. Broota, conversely, does nothing of the above. He uses large formats to paint human forms larger than life, holding and drawing the viewer’s attention to aspects that would otherwise have been overlooked. Broota also uses the scale to highlight the minute (and magnify) details.
What makes the works even more awe inspiring is his painting process, where he does not merely apply paint, but also simultaneously removes it! Let us explain: he uses a blade to etch out the details – confusing? He lays down paint on canvas, the first layer being the light sepia tone, this is then covered with the darker tones, which he scrapes away with a sharp blade. This is a process developed by Broota and no artist is known to have used.
His process of painting is painstaking, he barely paints 2 canvases in a year, and he is happy with this, because he believes that he paints only when he has something pressing to share.
Let us look at the evolution of his work over the years. He has been making art since 1964, when he graduated from the College of Art in Delhi. In the early years he made bold expressionistic portraits and was quite successful, but within a span of three years he was restless. Soon after he began the ape series, which were satirical commentaries on the then contemporary social and political situations. Today these are much sought after!
However, he characteristically changed course again and moved away from the personal and contextual subjects to introspective musings. This led to the emergence of the ‘man’ series, where the apes morphed into the body of a man, shorn of the contextual setting they appeared as the nude form. This was in the 1980’s, which was also the time when he developed the ‘nick blade’ technique. These soon gained acceptance and Broota was sought out by collectors.
Broota continued to evolve and experiment. In the late 1990’s he took to photography as a medium and once again struck a different path but still large format works. He superseded the limits of the medium, which would have projected the immediate world, tweaking, and playing with the composition to create an image that was painterly, capturing a larger essence. And here too the artist is able to only 7 to 9 images in a year!
Yet another hat that the artist wears is that of a teacher, since graduating he taught at the College of Art, Delhi and for the past few decades has been teaching at the Triveni Kala Kendra in Delhi.
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