‘A Different Road’: The work of Pradeep Thalawatta

Thursday, 22 November 2012 00:29 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

By Annoushka Hempel

Hempel Galleries is proud to represent Pradeep Thalawatta in his solo exhibition, ‘A Different Road,’ which will open this Friday 23 November at the Lionel Wendt Gallery, Colombo 7.

Featuring brand new works, this exhibition is a skilful embodiment of the frenetic energy of his impressions of living in Jaffna, Sri Lanka.

As usual, I am impressed with how Pradeep Thalawatta, has yet again reinvented his latest body of work, with the title ‘A Different Road’. These works flow seamlessly from his previous works, in a powerful narrative that leaves one with that burning curiosity of ‘what next?’

When I first met Thalawatta in 2004, his artistic investigations incorporated highly urban situations: Industrial materials, mass-production, pop/celebrity icons and personal episodes of his life. He was dealing with absorption with urban allure, commenting on consumer anxieties and feelings of isolation and loneliness in the big city.

More recently Thalawatta’s interests have shifted to the ever changing landscapes in South Asia. During a residency in Bangalore this year, Thalawatte created a giant installation consisting of thirty curtains assembled in a large circle in which you could walk around. These panels represented digital images of the changing face of the city of Bangalore, combining the old and new, creating an eclectic vision of the noticed and the ever present unnoticed.

Thalawatta also exhibited at the University of Fine Arts in Jaffna this year, in a show entitled ‘Red & White’ using the red and white vertical lines of the Hindu Kovil carried into each work. ‘Red & White’ depicted visual attractions in a socially and culturally different environment, as it also attempted to locate the artists’ own identify within that environment.

The works that Thalawatta presented in the 2012 Colombo Art Biennale: ‘Becoming’, extended the theme of ‘Red & White’ expansively and expressed the changing landscapes of Jaffna where he produced the hypnotising, ‘Disappearing & Reappearing Landscape’; a mirage of a landscape that at the same time, almost is, and almost was, seemingly simultaneously appearing and disappearing in front of your eyes.

The idea of changing landscapes has very much been carried through into this exciting new body of work ‘A Different Road’ which as insinuated, features the road as that which runs through and features in each work. Road, sea and sky. Sky, new road and old road. Road that erases that which once was. Road that breaks up history. The Game of the Road. The Road that leads to….? are all addressed.

Notably, ‘Shoe-flower (red hibiscus) tree, shows the beauty that is both worshipped and projected, held by the tarmac of the newly laden road that both shackles and permanentises its existence within the landscape. Whichever way you choose to look at it, the living roots show that whatever is being moulded on the surface, cannot control the innate capacity of that which is greater and lives on.