Between Petals and Silence: Jagath Ravi on stillness, boredom, and seeing beyond the form

There’s a hush in Jagath Ravi’s paintings. Like sitting next to someone who doesn’t say much but is thinking everything. His solo exhibit Between Petals and Silence opens like that. A room stilled mid-thought. A soft gesture. A slouched shoulder. A tilted bottle. You think you know what you’re looking at, maybe a child sad in class, maybe a familiar shape slightly undone, but the longer you linger, the more the works shift under your gaze.

Jagath Ravi’s solo exhibit explores the stillness of everyday gestures, classroom glances, and fleeting emotional states through a deeply instinctual process of painting

This Chennai-based artist brings together nearly a decade of practice, a day job as a middle school art teacher, and an instinctive understanding of how stillness can speak. He trained as an engineer before stumbling into art school. “I joined engineering. Dropped out. Tried again. Dropped out again,” he says. It was an uncle who pointed him toward the Government College of Fine Arts in Egmore, telling him, “Apparently, you can just draw and get a degree.” Jagath thought it was a scam. But after a slow, unglamorous start, something clicked. “That’s when I realised how deep and serious the subject is.”

Now, years later, he paints in a way that’s closely tied to his classroom. “People often ask me why the figures in my paintings look sad,” he says. “But to me, they’re not sad, they’re just bored of me.” The work often begins after a long day, when the expressions of disinterested students linger. “I replay those bored faces on the drive back to my studio,” he explains. “It’s like a confession. I pour everything that happened in class onto the canvas.”

Yet Between Petals and Silence is not only about the classroom. Jagath is equally drawn to still life and form. “I enjoy distorting the familiar, a bottle, a leaf, and placing things in unusual ways,” he says. The compositions evolve without a fixed plan. “The canvas tells me what to do. If I put down green, it demands something to complement it. It’s instinctual. The only thing I’m sure of is what not to do.”

That openness to chance and reinterpretation is central to Jagath’s practice, and his philosophy. “Even I don’t know what’s going on in some paintings,” he says. “Only after I finish and come back to it later, I might see something. Everything is a maybe. It’s like getting to know yourself a little better.”

He believes the way we teach and understand art, especially to children, needs to change. “I always wanted to tell this to parents,” he says. “If one child draws a water bottle exactly as it is, and another draws it differently, don’t celebrate the first as if that’s the end goal. Drawing realistically is not the end product of art.” Instead, he says, we should rethink how we define visual literacy. “Each person has their own visual sense.” To him, art is like taste. “Some people like dipping bhajji in tea, some mix curd rice and rasam, some add mango slices to ice cream. Visual sense is like that, completely individual.”

Between Petals and Silence: Jagath Ravi on stillness, boredom, and seeing beyond the formDespite his philosophical leanings, Jagath doesn’t aim to be overly academic. “I don’t want to be boxed in, ‘the guy who paints kids’ or ‘the classroom artist.’ Tomorrow I might do something totally abstract. That freedom matters.”

As for the meanings projected onto his work, he shrugs them off. “Sometimes people ask what this gesture means or why this colour. I honestly don’t know. When I work, it’s about the act of doing. That’s the most honest part. If it looks like it contradicts what I’ve said before, that’s okay. I change. We all do.”

One memory stands out, a past exhibit featured eight closely packed figures with tiny gaps of negative space between their bodies. A viewer approached Jagath and said the piece reminded him of his family, eight siblings, with his mother as the youngest. She had passed away recently, and he could see all of them in the painting. “That really stayed with me,” says Jagath. “He didn’t ask me what it meant, he told me what it meant to him.”

A quiet curation

Curator Ashvin E Rajagopalan recalls first meeting Jagath as a student. “What caught my attention immediately was the way he handled figuration. There was a strong academic foundation in his technique, something that clearly comes from the legacy of the Madras School. But at the same time, there was something very current in the way he used texture and colour.”

Ashvin speaks of a “visual lightness” in Jagath’s work. “They carry a softness, a kind of weightlessness, even when they’re large in scale. That contrast between their size and their gentle presence creates a quiet impact.”

The exhibition’s title, Between Petals and Silence, is more than poetic, it’s an entryway into how the curator sees these works. “Each artwork is like a flower. But it’s the spaces between the petals, the unnoticed moments, that hold a certain beauty. Similarly, the silence between the observer and the observed is where the real experience of beauty happens.”

On the curatorial process, Ashvin emphasises trust and surprise. “I intentionally hold space for surprise. I don’t interfere with an artist’s creative process. So when the works come together, it’s as fresh for me as it is for the audience. With this show, we selected 10 to 12 pieces out of many. Seeing how well they spoke to each other and to the space, it was deeply satisfying.”

Between Petals and Silence is on view at Ashvita’s, Mylapore, until August 21. Free entry.

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