Life amongst the stones

An exhibition of Paintings by Shehan Madawela at the 706 Gallery, 706 Galle Road, Colombo 3, is now on and continues till August 10

Shehan Madawela's paintings would be read as symbolic/mythic that could make material for intellectual construction but they are really documents of a more insidious presence.

First of all in India someone is always watching - the sentinels are omnipresent not hostile, but always there, even in comic forms.The playful central figure observing this wasteland devoid of human presence is also wasted by it and barely engaged; he is an adventitious presence guiding our perceptions carefully even as he is the centre of our perception complex. He is frail, wispy with a skin of paint, like the objects he contemplates, or the objects from within which he looks out to us with a certain indifference.

Of course, Shehan has a history as a manipulator of symbols. His paintings have been generative images for him. But this new work has a presence stronger than its careless symbols. It has made the symbolic complex minimal.

Very few people are successful in the creation and maintenance of fantasies. A fantasy can be destroyed by a mere word, or even a gesture. Everyone is familiar with their culture bound sexual fantasies, but even fewer people are capable of initiating a sustained creative dialogue. There are so many different ways that painters work. Some learn painterly skills ; some construct; some bring diverse elements together in harmony. Others build on destruction.

Shehan is a painter who has learned painting from painting. He meticulously paints his way into his images and then unceremoniously paints his way out of them.

The exploration is an exploration through colour. Consciousness is below the surface. Painters who learn to paint through painting are tenacious. They hold their images like new children and explore them ruthlessly; the eye of the painter ceaselessly watching. I have heard prolific artists say that they have really only had one idea.

It is night when the shadows fall and the artists wander. It is then that the patterns reveal themselves against the indigo sky and against the glare of orange.

The day is too full of the shimmering of heat-even without global warming. But even the stones are threatened; indeed whole mountains are reduced to rubble. The stones rarely speak but the stones are there for the handful who have chosen to wander among them and decipher the stories of their mutilations.

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