Throughout his short yet prolific career, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran has created new sculptural possibilities using various methodologies converging around clay. Originality pulsates from his at once joyful and terrifying forms, and an undertow of humour helps clear our preconceptions to make way for something distinctively fresh. In his first solo exhibition at Sullivan+Strumpf’s new Melbourne gallery, Ramesh explores histories oficonoclasm. Fascinated by the erasure, destruction, and theft of cultural icons, he stares deeply at what lies behind the scratched-out faces, missing limbs, and displaced artefacts of a global past and how these can be reframed to help guide a path forward. In one of our conversations, Ramesh reflected that the "...preservation and display of fragmented figures in various museum collections around the world have always struck me. The headless, limbless deities (or sometimes effigies) whose provenance is unclear, encourage me to consider the language and ethics of what may be termed faith-based collections. I’ve always gazed at these fragmented figures and imagined possibilities of regeneration. In 2023, a time of rising global nationalism, what kinds of imagery could gesture to cultural plurality?"

Ramesh’s ecstatic vision emerges from his fascination with the human figure and its representations through histories, across cultures. He draws upon his own cultural experiences, ideas of idolatry and worship, and a fascination with South Asian vernacular to create a distinctive figurative language. He states: "I’m interested in syncretic languages specific to South Asia. The way Hindu, Buddhist, and even Christian imagery pollinated various histories makes me think deeply about the plurality at the centre of what we consider regionally specific dialogues. After arriving in Sydney with his parents as a Tamil refugee in 1989, he spent his early years considering familial practices of Hinduism and Catholicism. Within these very different spheres of worship, he became fascinated by the contrast and similarities of figurative representation, paving the way to an extensive body of work dissecting, abstracting, and reframing the body."

In person, Ramesh’s physical presence is unmistakable. Like his sculptures, he is statuesque and lively. His quick laughter ruptures and lights up the room. His fashion sensibilities are remarkable. He’s a master of mixing saturated colours and clashing prints, designer clothes and Crocs with platforms higher than you’ve ever seen. He is also industrious, focused, and articulate; a polymath working with confident intention and a lively sense of humour. His works are expressive and intuitive, but also the result of a considered process involving a high level of research, material understanding, and social and cultural awareness. I rarely see him without a tool in his hands, whether a posca pen, carving implement, iPad, or whiteboard marker. He is always poised to make notes, a quick sketch, or add detail to wet clay. He fills diaries with drawings that become references and inspiration for new works. His autographic gestures are fast, fluid, and uninhibited, and he never second guesses a line, sure in his own well-developed aesthetic language.

With fragments of sculpted body parts and curious heads waiting in the background of our zoom call, Ramesh described his compositions. "Many of the works in this exhibition have been crudely formed. The torsos, heads, and votive props have been built separately and visibly pieced together in my studio in ways that are hopefully aesthetically and even philosophically unexpected. They might seem a bit ugly, but I’m not interested in making pretty things." His towering clay totems are created like a game of cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse). You may have played this game yourself as a child: the first player adds a head and then folds the paper over, the next person adds a torso without knowing what the head looks like, and so on. From here, a strange, comical, and surreal character is born. For Ramesh, this fantastic figurative game births timeless polymorphic beings, draped and adorned, nourished by historical iconography and contemporary image culture.

The use of unglazed terracotta further reveals his skill at breathing life into the inanimate. These pieces have a distinct texture, with fingerprints visible on the surface; the hands that made the work are plain to see. Ramesh told me, "I’m newly interested in histories of unglazed terracotta. There is something timeless and promiscuous about the register of these surfaces. The almost primordial sensibility of fashioning or reflecting life from this primary material makes me feel connected to makers and artisans who were working with their hands, earth and fire thousands of years ago."

Fascinated by the hands and craft that construct our material world, Ramesh is not interested in slick outcomes but rather in the personal and the animate. His works are sentient, anthropomorphic avatars. Some are multi-limbed and predatory, and others are just heads without bodies. Each lively character has at least one face. Some have many of varying proportions and symmetry, often with expressions resembling emojis (Face with Tongue, or the Miley Cyrus Tongue Face). I imagine them as a grand army of shapeshifters, eclectic misfits, and time travellers, looking to the past and future, to different cultures and heritage, to a place where diversity is unremarkable. I sense that they come to life when the doors are closed; it's a party I'd like to attend, but I'm not sure I'd be welcome.

Ramesh loves snakes, and you’ll always notice a rubber snake or two embedded somewhere in his works. I don’t like snakes. In fact, they terrify me. But I love how wholly and frequently they shed their skin, making room for new growth and leaving parasitic baggage behind. This is precisely the shock and drama that a sculptural object needs to announce itself in an already crowded world. It’s something that Ramesh knows and understands; his work has a persistent and comedic drama. Considering both the object, and the negative space around it, he consciously installs his work to influence how an audience might experience it. His installations will stop you in your tracks, surprise you, and make you wonder what world you have entered. Simple mechatronic animation and LED rope lights that create dramatic air sketches, unite technology and primordial sculptural techniques in a futuristic exploration of the elements. Earth, fire, air, and water, enter electricity in place of aether.

His show culminates with a new series of highly patinated, polychromatic bronze works. Using an ancient lost wax technique—with origins tracing back to the Chola dynasty in ancient India—the process maintains extraordinary detail and enables an exact rendition of the original clay sculpture. I visited the Mal Wood Foundry in Melbourne as these new works were being cast. The scene was dramatic and sensorial. Molten bronze bubbled in a crucible atop a roaring fire, steam filled the air each time the lid was lifted, and a pungent metallic odour permeated the room, the noise of polishing and patination thundered in the background. It was a thrilling display of material transfiguration, harnessing the power of fire and ancient techniques.

Bronze monuments in Western contexts have often depicted victorious white males, celebrating a scarred and violent history of conquest and colonialism. The six bronze warrior and guardian figures presented here are in vital contrast. They preside fluidly over the beginning and the end, reaching through time and space, poised and ready, protectors of icons. They are elaborately embellished, abounding with hidden surprises that upend expectations and keep you looking. Here, a durian is cast as a smiling, armoured handbag, a shell is a nipple, a cocktail straw is a penis, and a figurine is buried teratoma-like in a shoulder. While a playful absurdity and humour draw you in, something else begins to unravel. Something more unattainable and uncomfortable, or is it otherworldly awe? His works sit at intersections and leave me with many questions. Is it a smile or a menacing grin? From the past or the future? Synthetic or organic? Male or female? They exist quite happily between dichotomies and uncertainty is part of what makes them so successful.

Working on a single plane of movement, Ramesh has developed his capacity to animate by integrating simple motion-sensing animatronics into two large, Janus-like bronze sculptures (Warrior Figure and Bi Warrior Figure). Encountering these rotating heads is an unexpected and delightful surprise. Ramesh explains, "I wanted these large sculptures to come alive with the introduction of industrial technology. It’s another nod to the mixing of time periods, languages and visual registers in my work. There is an almost crude cartoon-like demonic sensibility to the kinetics."

With these new works, Ramesh forges an unvarnished polychromatic unity of global traditions and aesthetics by mining the fertile ground between contrasting cultural and historical identities. He seeks to uncover what lies beneath the surface of disparate pasts, using centuries-old processes to sculpt global narratives. From the ruins of cultural artifacts comes a new body of work with eyes firmly set on an open and radical future.