Radhakrishnan’s earliest sculpture that survives is a torso. It is a composite of convex units grafted into a massive torso, presenting not a truncated body but the torso as an organic whole. All breasts and buttocks, sliced and rounded and held together by a taut geometry of sensuality, one could call her a cross between the Venus of Willendorf and a voluptuous yakshi. In her monumentality, which is more an expression of structure than a matter of size, she is his first woman, the primitive mother from whom all the more civilised women in his work would proceed. And acknowledging her matriarchal position at the head of his oeuvre, he would also subsequently choose to call her Mother Torso.

​

The sculptures that immediately followed are also truncated bodies, parts infused with the spirit of the whole, and with other forms of life. Partly inspired by the work of his teacher Sarbari Roy Choudhury and partly by the modernist practice of fragmentation and distortion, he reduced the body into a torso or an ambiguous synecdoche. He gave them an organic inflection or a geometric dynamism, with an interest in movement common to both. These were followed by sculptures of the female body in full. Despite their occasional cubist faceting, their contorted, eroded, tortuous, and swiftly turning bodies released a bounty of primeval sensuality with fierce libidinal energy. In one, he marries the figure with the tree to produce a form that both totters and spirals upward at the same time. In another, he unites the bodies of a woman and a slinky animal, headless and prowling, like a contortionist, on all fours. What strikes us is the convergence of the body and the sculptural material into metaphors of sensuality, and this sets the ground for his more mature work as a sculptor.

​

With the extremes omitted the body is often condensed into a torso and the pelvis becomes the vortex of all bodily movements; the point from which all rhythms and trajectories of vision emanate and to which they are returned. Among his early work The Horizontal Form carved in white marble – a rarity in his modeller’s oeuvre – expresses this most emphatically. 

​

In the works done during the last two years Radhakrishnan spent in Santiniketan, the figure-objects with their more angled planes and sharper ridges are not only condensed but also have their energies compressed. The figures now appear not in isolation but in conjunction with props like characters on a stage. In these tabletop theatres, where action is fused with the scenario, the compressed-bodies appear sometimes relaxed and sometimes terse. They don’t tell stories but delineate moods. Formally this is achieved by playing organic forms against geometric settings.

​