There is a particular kind of homesickness that has nothing to do with distance. It is the ache for a moment that is still happening, the instinct to hold onto a Tuesday night on the couch before it is even over.
That feeling is the engine behind Ricky Vasan's work.
Seven Negronis, 2025 | Oil on Linen | Courtesy of Galerie ISA
Born in 2001 in Dehradun, India, Vasan is a representational painter now based in Providence, Rhode Island, where he is an MFA candidate in painting at RISD following a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art & Design in 2023. His resume already moves dynamically between New England galleries and the international fair circuit.
He has mounted a debut solo show at Galerie ISA in Mumbai where he is represented, presented booths at the India Art Fair and Abu Dhabi Art, and secured a spot in the RISD Museum's Big Fat South Asian Show. This arrives alongside the George Nick Award, the Rob Moore Grant, and a Best in Show at the Cambridge Art Association's National Prize Show.
But the awards are just scaffolding. What Vasan is really after is smaller, and much harder to catch.... Painting as a way of remembering...
Painting in Providence, Rhode Island, USA
Two Aliens Share a Beer, 2022
Courtesy of Galerie ISA
"Yearning is the word his whole practice turns on: not nostalgia for something lost, but a present-tense wanting to stay in a moment a little longer."
To See Beyond Everything With Your Eyes Closed, 2023 | Oil on Canvas | Courtesy of Galerie ISA
The Nostalgia of the Present
Vasan paints domestic life: house parties, couch evenings, the people who matter most to him. As he told Providence arts writer Michael Rose, painting people he loves is genuinely therapeutic. It lets him spend time with them, and the process pulls up every memory of that person. As an immigrant, he is always missing someone no matter where he is, missing India while missing Providence.
Kate & Elias, 2024
Colt State Park, 2025
A casual picnic with friends. The colors remain bright but muted, like a snapshot worth saving.
There Is Never Enough Time In The World, 2022
Dissonance as Form
Vasan is also a musician, and dissonance, notes that do not resolve, shows up visually in his canvases. Space collapses, figures vibrate, and objects stack instead of sitting in tidy perspective. He has described the goal as tapping into a tender moment stripped of logical time, accuracy, and space.
It becomes something truer to how memory feels than to how a camera would record it. A photograph starts the process, but by the time a painting is finished, it has been pulled apart by revision until it matches the haze of real remembering.
Domesticity and the celebration of the mundane sounds modest, but in Vasan's hands it is the moment you will never forget. They are the unremarkable Tuesday, the friend on the couch, the beer shared with someone who might as well be from another planet.
Vasan is unmistakably an artist whose ambition stays disarmingly human: to paint honestly enough that 'a little while longer' actually feels like it lasted.
The Drawing Room, 2024
Oil on Canvas, 60x72 in. Courtesy of Galerie ISA
Friends of Friends
Ricky Vasan, painter & musician, in front of one of his pieces.
Kissers, 2026
Where Do We Come From
Artwork Credits:
Ricky Vasan : Galerie ISA : Michael Rose : Curiat Editorial Archive
