PROFILES

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran

Primordial Psychedelia

By Michael Young

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran prefers the nomenclature of “contemporary artist who works with ceramics,” although that description seems plain, given the nature of his oeuvre. His unconventional, colorful and eclectic works range from rough-edged—almost naive in their aesthetic—small figurative sculptures that explore gender, sex and religion, to large-scale totems of fired clay that seem to have been thrown together in an orgiastic frenzy of arte povera abandon. Materials including cement, human hair, ceramics, polystyrene…