ARTIST STATEMENT.
Dheepan Ramanan revivifies the imagination with a raw, uncircumcised approach. His work unveils deliberate chaos—madness contained on canvas. His work embodies the holiness of human sexuality, while displaying the body as a carcass, a vessel of flesh for the soul. His work is a direct descendent of 20th century expressionists, recontextualized through traditional Hindu and Greco-Roman mythology. Ramanan reinscribes mysticism through unearthly portraits. He delves into the darkest fathoms of the unconscious mind, capturing the chaos of the human psyche.
History is pivotal to Ramanan’s artistic vision. A child of Sri Lankan refugees escaping from an escalating civil war, an inherited sense of societal violence and chaos colors his subconscious. This psyche of escaped trauma is vectored through inspiration from Hindu temples, with their innumerable sculptures of juxtaposing concepts. Harsh lines, dark colorings, multiplicity of forms, and distortion in figuration are the common fixtures of his visual language. In this way, Ramanan has much in common with historical expressionists like Max Beckmann and Willem de Kooning, artists rooted in visualizing the vivacity of the lived experience.