A certain grief belongs to art history and art history alone: the grief of realising, too late, that someone extraordinary was working quietly in the same city, in the same era, and that the world simply did not look hard enough. R Varadarajan, born in Tamil Nadu in 1935, who studied under KCS Paniker, who exhibited at the 1961 Paris Biennale and the 1964 International Graphic Art Exhibition in Poland, whose works sit in the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, is that kind of artist. He passed in 2019. And most of us, truthfully, had no idea.
Ashvita's is trying to fix that. Vessels of Vulnerability, a new exhibition featuring Varadarajan's drawings, is not merely a show. It is a retrieval. And walking into it, you get the distinct sense that these works have been waiting.
Curator Rithik Pramod, who came to Ashvita's in 2024 from an archaeology background, describes the experience of working through the archive with disarming honesty. He wasn't an art historian arriving with a thesis. He was someone learning through proximity, through time spent close to work that quietly expanded the longer he stayed with it. "What genuinely surprised me," he says, "was realising how little the general public seemed to know about him, despite the emotional depth and significance of his practice. The longer I worked with the archive, the more I understood how important his contribution was, not just to the Madras Art Movement, but to Indian modernism more broadly. That realisation stayed with me personally."
It should stay with us too. Varadarajan was not a marginal figure in his lifetime. He taught at the Government College of Arts and Crafts until 1994. He won the National Award from the Lalit Kala Akademi. He stood on international stages. And yet, as Rithik observes, the mainstream narrative of Indian modernism has long been written around Bombay, Baroda, and Delhi, around movements that were institutionally legible and geographically central. Artists working outside those coordinates, however significant, were quietly left at the margins. Varadarajan is not an exception to that pattern. He is its most eloquent proof.
What makes this exhibition worth your time is its specific focus on the drawings. Rithik describes them as the nervous system of the practice, and the description is exact. Where Varadarajan's paintings arrive finished and distilled, the drawings catch him mid-struggle, mid-thought, in the act of trying to understand what he feels before he knows how to say it. "They peel back the polished layers to expose the core tension and anxiety," Rithik says, "feeling less like completed artworks and more like an intimate, honest diary of the human mind."
This matters because the entire philosophy behind Varadarajan's work is built on an internal three-stage process. Absorption: he takes in the raw weight of experience, suffering, fragility, and psychological strain. Distillation: he lets it settle, trusting that painting difficult memories too directly empties them of their depth. And then residue, what Rithik calls "the purified remains of that emotional journey," the only thing left after the literal surface has been filtered away. In the drawings, you see all three stages at once. That is why they feel so alive.
A 1965 work in the show stopped Rithik entirely during the archival process. Tangled calligraphic lines in black and red ink, shapes that suggest bodies or plants and then refuse to confirm either. "Since ink is permanent, each stroke feels like a raw, honest thought recorded in the moment," he says. "This made me realise his art goes beyond aesthetics. It's a hands-on, gritty way of transforming the heavy, often unstable human experience into something visible and concrete."
Varadarajan's relationship to the Madras Art Movement is worth understanding on its own terms, because it complicates the version most people carry. The movement is often discussed through cultural symbols, Tantric geometry, indigenous visual language, a modernism that looked inward toward heritage. Varadarajan did something different. He looked inward toward the psyche. His abstraction was not a visual code rooted in shared cultural meaning. It was, as Rithik puts it, "about transforming unprocessed psychological states into form rather than creating a narrative or employing a code." The body in his work is never heroic, never whole. It appears broken, exposed, sometimes close to disappearing entirely. By refusing the ideal figure, he showed people in states of fragility, suspended between being present and fading away.
That insistence on holding fragility open rather than resolving it is what makes the work feel so urgent right now. We live in an era that rewards certainty and speed and treats ambiguity as a problem. Varadarajan's canvases do the opposite. "In an age of rapid consumption," Rithik says, "his art demands patience and emotional involvement. It unfolds slowly, encouraging viewers to engage with complexity instead of seeking quick answers."
What Rithik hopes visitors carry out is not an art historical lesson, though one is available here for those who want it. It is something closer to a reorientation. "I want visitors to understand vulnerability as a strong and enduring part of being human, not as weakness," he says. "These works reveal themselves over time, reminding us that art doesn't have to answer everything immediately."
Varadarajan spent a career building that case in ink and paint and print, across six decades, in a city that did not always remember to look. Now it can.
Free entry. May 28 onwards. From 11 am to 7 pm. At Ashvita’s, Mylapore.
Email: shivani@newindianexpress.com
X: @ShivaniIllakiya
For more updates, join/follow our WhatsApp, Telegram and YouTube channels