Chandraguptha Thenuwara’s ‘Beautification’
Harriet Doble-2 Aug, 2013
Leading Sri Lankan artist Chandraguptha Thenuwara’s most recent exhibition entitledBeautification makes parody of contemporary Sri Lanka by suggesting that peace is but a façade and that the conflict is in fact on-going. Beautification serves as a reflection of life during and post-war. My conversation with Thenuwara led me to believe that his strong opinions, coupled with the fact that he had witnessed and experienced the war first hand, were vital ingredients in creating art of such calibre. Through a combination of outstanding mosaics, sculpture, drawings and paintings, Thenuwara infers his ideas with great power, whilst concurrently using his art, which cannot be controlled nor suppressed, as a display of rebellion.
The exhibition’s composition takes an appropriately untraditional form to pre-empt its untraditional content. Upon entering the Lionel Wendt gallery, I was somewhat surprised not to see paintings hung on the walls. Instead, as I entered, the walls appeared to be entirely white. It was only once I looked around the seemingly plain room, simple in its structure, that I noticed that behind the corners there were paintings, drawings and works of mixed media hung on the walls. The exhibition was assembled in such a way that Thenuwara was able to immediately confront the viewer with one of the exhibition’s fundamental requirements; that is to actively look, rather than passively gaze, at the art. Thenuwara expressed his belief that as humans, we are condemned by passivity, and that every human has a duty and an ability to make peace, should he or she make an active attempt. By challenging the traditional gallery composition, Thenuwara engages the active mind of his viewers from the offset, as he requires the viewer to actively search for the hidden artwork. These hidden elements represent his assertion that what one sees at first glance is a superficial snapshot of the wider picture, and that one has to dig deeper in order to gain a true knowledge of what lies beneath, both within the gallery and within contemporary Sri Lankan society.
