Lalit Kala Akademi is one of the finest and active art and cultural hubs in the city. With exhibits happening round-the-clock, the walls of the venue have heard the voices of artists across generations over the last couple decades. But last week, there was a deliberate silence that filled the first-floor hall of the Akademi. It was in this serenity that Ramalingam Muthukrishnan’s latest exhibition came to life.

The show was inaugurated by Trotsky Marudhu, chairman, MGR Government Film and Television Training Institute — and also the artist’s college senior — in the presence of Ramalingam’s long-time classmates-turned-friends, family, artists, and students.

The Chennai-based painter and printmaker has spent over four decades building a deeply personal visual language that symbolically expresses his feelings and imagination. For him, painting becomes an intimate language that holds what cannot be spoken, as he has been deaf since birth and was later diagnosed with Usher Syndrome, resulting in tunnel vision and night blindness. “Art is born within me from restlessness — an inner turbulence shaped by disturbance, distance, and an unceasing need for communication,” he writes in his statement.

At the centre of the exhibition are his signature faceless figurines, mainly female. Their elongated, rope-like braids cascade across canvases, at times framing the body and becoming the main character. Explaining his artistic expression, his statement reads, “The women who inhabit my paintings are born from lived experience and symbolism; they are fragile yet resilient, delicate yet powerful — embodiments of feminine felicity. These figures exist beyond individuality, often faceless, goddess-like, and larger than life, occupying a space that is at once transcendent and deeply physical.” The exhibition displays nearly 100 of his artworks — acrylic on canvas and pen drawings — produced since 2013.

The works are striking in their use of saturated tropical colours like turquoise blues, burnt oranges, and deep reds, which are set against flat backgrounds. The absence of conventional light and shadow lends the figures a floating, almost surreal, quality. “Contrasts between saturated tropical colours and flat backgrounds heighten a sense of yearning and alienation,” the artist explains.

Across the canvases, recurring motifs disrupt the visual stillness. Bananas and watermelons appear unexpectedly beside solitary figures, checkerboard floors resemble game-like terrains, and in a few compositions, a half-bodied white tiger quietly enters the frame. These elements, as Ramalingam puts it, introduce “play, unease, and symbolic disruption”. Importantly, the artist does not offer definitive explanations for these symbols; instead, the works remain open to self-interpretation, echoing his own lived experience where perception itself is fluid and deeply personal.

In some works, architectural fragments like houses and geometric grids appear alongside the figures, hinting at questions of space, belonging, and identity. Elsewhere, fragmented bodies drift in and out of the frame, creating compositions that feel incomplete yet intentional. Observing his 2020 works, the figures are seen wearing masks, indicating the Covid pandemic.

What binds the exhibition together is its refusal to tell a single cohesive story. Instead, it offers a series of emotional and visual fragments inviting viewers to engage, interpret, and return. As the artist writes, the works “invite the viewer into a metaphysical realm where reality is questioned with grace, sensuality, and quiet defiance.”