Kaleidoscope

Kaleidoscope, one of A. Ramachandran’s earliest oils, allows the viewer to understand the frailty of the human condition from the artist’s perspective. Noted art historian, critic, and curator, R. Siva Kumar mentioned how this painting evoked ‘not only pain, emptiness and death but also the loss of human wholeness. They invoke man torn into parts, broken down into fragments’. Kaleidoscope shows motifs of torture—a severed head, a limp body, another hollowed figure in a drape, all of which evoke a sense of acute anguish.