Ramish Mario Nithiyendran Goes Pop!

Experiencing the work of Sydney based artist Ramish Mario Nithiyendran for the first time at National Gallery of Australia in 2016 when he installed the exhibition 'Mud Men' many things seemed to fall into place.
The gallery's brutalist architecture sets the tone for the raw and functional concrete and cardboard plinths that his sculpture sit on. Some of these plinths are the height of the viewers and are covered with naive drawings or tags, others resemble the shapes of Aztec designs. The steely cool concrete room and the shards of light from the ceiling let the cool Canberra sky beam through creating an austerity that delights in the juxtapostion to the sculptures created by Nithiyendran.

Mud Men, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

The grunge aesthetic and shock of colour of these ceramic sculptures in this installation jar against the cool modernity of their surroundings with their generous textual quality that demonstrates the artists love of clay work, his ability of expression through paint and his skill in the process of glazing. His imagination and work rate allow each piece to fizzle with personality and their totemic stature creates monsters, but monsters that you would want to have as your friend.
One of the reasons that each of Nithiyendran's pieces is infused with such individuality is they bristle with the themes that intersect throughout each work. He says he "explores themes of fertility, creation, destruction, eroticism, exoticism, Christianity, Hinduism, outsider aesthetics, monumentality, autobiography, imperialism and much more".
Nithiyendran was born in Sri Lanka in 1988, and sources of Hindu and Christian mythologies and iconographies are referenced in his work. Although he is an atheist he has drawn upon creation stories as sources to be re-imagined, often by drawing onto his figures with spray paint giving them  both male and female anatomy  to suggest gender fluidity. They could be Adam or Eve, Shiva or Parvati, but the importance of gender in these mythologies is no longer ignored or ambiguous.
The symbol of the serpent in mythical imagery and stories is a recurring theme in Nithiyendran work, each time transforming as a phallus with figures showing exaggerated male anatomy,  this has been described as "mirroring the phallocentric condition that continues to pervade contemporary life" by Jacqueline Doughty in her essay for the show 'In the Beginning' at the Ian Potter Museum.

Installation views of 'In the Beginning', The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne

The installation of this exhibition feels closer to Nithiyendran's playful and provocative style than the installation at the N.G.A, the ceramic figures are smaller in scale but lose none of their provocative and fun characteristics. The customised mix of plinths that include ones made from crappy cardboard are mixed in with hand picked display cases with exhibits from the museums collection, these all go to set the eccentric and exciting  tone in the show, while the normal white walls are painted with  vibrant pinks and yellows and displays of the artist's instagram handle are bombed over the walls in spray paint, while naive chalk drawings of figures in the familiar style of the ceramics.

Collection of work shown in “Looking at me looking at you” portrait prize, University of Queensland, 2017

Two years on from those two installations Nithiyendran's gallery work is less about the relationship of the viewer to these mythological and totemic figures and have a consistent size after being scaled down to reflect an  intimacy with the artist's sensibilities. The symbolic nature of clay still allows the artist to make the figures more personal by showing the rich thick substance resembling bodily flesh, while the artists vivd imagination brings them to life.

 The artist's online presence, including the colourful instagram account rams_deep69, that presents his hard working and energetic style of combining the world of ceramics with graffiti and emoji's in a hyperactive pop art whirl, goes hand in hand with deciphering the true identity behind so many portraits and faces as the muliti-faceted personality of this artist.