Broota's earliest work in the retrospective is his 1963 Self Portrait that reveals a 22-year-old man with a cursive moustache and evasive eyes. The title of a 1969 painting perhaps exposes his own artistic dilemma about which direction to proceed in. What To Do, a 70 inch by 100 inch triptych featuring three variations of the same emaciated male body, possibly a labourer, seems wedged between his evolving Ape series and his emerging inclination towards the nakedness of the flesh. He chose the satirical path, and his paintings in the early 70s were sardonic depictions of the ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. Anatomy of that Old Story (1970) is the most literal exposition of this humanist endeavour, featuring a bikini-clad ape grinning fiendishly over the prospect of a full plate as two scrawny figures on the right, caricatured versions of Khosa and Broota, are aghast; in fact Broota's painted counterpart is hungry to the bone. In his own words, the Gorilla or Ape series "tried to depict a pre-human reality typified by a terrifying brutality." However, towards the late 70s, his focus began to shift towards the interior, and his figures assumed both solidity and solitariness, the monochromatic effect served to minimise distractions, so that after the archeological excavation facilitated by the nicking of the blade, what emerged was fragile, flickering light; the possibility of a soul. Monumentality of scale was integral to Broota's continuing interrogation of the male body. Pointing at Runners, a 1982 work that was among collector Kiran Nadar's very first purchases, Broota admits to thinking of his subjects according to size. "This subject demands scale," he says. "If it was 40 inches by 40 inches, it wouldn't have the same effect." It explains why his total output is limited to 300 paintings. In his more recent work, the intensity of scale is most prominent as the large canvases depict not whole bodies as much as abstracted parts, surface wounds, perforated skin, stigmata. They are traces "suggestive of man", of what is "left behind" or "disappeared", "fossilised space." They represent, according to Broota, "man and his fate, like his existence when civilisation is wiped out." They hint at suffering and pain while simultaneously proffering the possibility of ecstasy. The solitariness of man is compounded in this synecdochic process of isolating a fragment of the body.

Rameshwar Broota

Rameshwar Broota: The Suspension of Matter

The Descent of Man