CHENNAI: Ashvita’s presents ‘R Varadarajan: Vessels of Vulnerability’, featuring the drawings of modern artist R Varadarajan. Varadarajan’s work is deeply personal and emotional.
Instead of directly showing life as it is, he transformed feelings and experiences into abstract visual forms. His works reflect pain, emotional struggle, and the fragile nature of human life. Through abstraction, he found a way to express emotions that ordinary images could not fully capture. At the centre of Varadarajan’s work is the instability of the human condition. In his paintings, the body often appears broken, exposed, or close to disappearing. Rather than showing ideal or heroic figures, he portrayed people in vulnerable emotional states, caught between presence and absence.
Spanning more than six decades, Varadarajan’s career was marked by constant experimentation with different mediums and styles. His passing in 2019 marked the end of a practice that pushed the Madras Art Movement beyond cultural symbolism and into the deeper psychological world of human emotions.
Curator of the exhibition Rithik Pramod says, “Vessels of Vulnerability encourages viewers to slowly engage with Varadarajan’s work instead of searching for instant meaning. His paintings are abstract but never emotionally distant. Through fragmented forms, restless gestures, and layered surfaces, the works express tension, fragility, silence, and introspection that still feel relevant today.”
Rithik has arranged the exhibition chronologically, combining artworks with archival material so viewers can move through different stages of Varadarajan’s six-decade practice. “I felt this structure was important because the vulnerability in his work unfolds slowly over time through repeated gestures, fragmented forms, and emotional intensity. The archival material shows the presence of the artist, while the artworks carry the emotional and psychological weight of the exhibition,” he explains.
The exhibition text speaks about ‘filtration’, transforming lived experiences into a visual language of the mind. One particular 1965 work became a turning point for the curator. “Unlike his larger paintings, this work captures struggle in real time. The tangled lines look like a nervous system under pressure, with forms appearing and disappearing at once. The emotional intensity in the black and red ink is powerful.
Since ink is permanent, every stroke feels raw and honest,” says Rithik.
Though associated with the Madras Art Movement, Varadarajan’s work moved away from cultural symbolism and focused more on emotional and psychological depth. “Instead of painting realistic scenes, he explored feelings such as fear, sorrow, anxiety and inner conflict. Abstraction, for him, was not about style or decoration; it was a way to process emotions and experiences,” the curator adds.
Through this exhibition, Rithik hopes younger artists and viewers connect with the freedom and honesty in Varadarajan’s practice. “He never wanted to be limited to one style or medium. Across six decades, he moved between painting and graphic art, experimenting with etching, transfer prints, paper stencils, and printing inks. I also hope viewers connect with the emotional honesty in his work. His paintings deal with fragility, anxiety, silence, and emotional states without trying to simplify them. In today’s world, where conversations around mental health and human emotions are increasingly important, younger audiences can still find something deeply relatable in his art.” The exhibition is from May 28 to June at Ashvita’s in Mylapore.