If Indian art is one prodigious celebration of life and its gift of sensuousness, there are also moments of introspection, not to be seen as moments of denial but reflexive withdrawals. Within his largely celebratory oeuvre, Radhakrishnan also creates some such moments. The first instance of such an effort can be seen in the portrait of a young Thai Buddhist monk he did while he was a student at Santiniketan, with the stirrings of the mind buried under the serenity of the monk’s face. Later Radhakrishnan returned to the underlying idea more eloquently in his retake of a well-known Gupta-period Buddha head with its facial features erased. Later he added subtle layers to the concept in Patinated Buddhas, six avatars of the same head cast in different metals with different finishes. 

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To gaze at these Buddha-heads is like gazing at a person lost in thought and impervious to what surrounds him. His very smooth, featureless face wrapped in an inscrutable calmness is like a wall; it deflects our look and shields his thoughts from us. The face which is the interface between the mind and the world, the plane on which we meet and scrutinise one another is walled up. The blank face here is a token of inaction, of withdrawal, of thoughtfulness and self-reflexion. Thus it is also a sign of temporary suspension of perception, and of intersubjectivity but not of death or of the negation of the world. It is an image of a man who, like a diver plunging into the depth of a lake, has momentarily exiled himself from the surface of the world. The image of the Buddha with an erased face tells us that though Radhakrishnan is primarily an artist of the body as known by body, he is also an artist fascinated by the tantalising depths of the mind.

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