Reborn in Virtual Fiction World’, an exhibition of paintings by Vajira Gunawardena

Vajira Gunawardena's resent work presents creatively compacted day today life fundamentally deal with the penetration of the mysteries in to normalcy. In the works from his exhibition held at the Paradise Road Galleries in Sri Lanka ‘Reborn in Virtual Fiction World’, we see wired looking human faces, drawn using bright colours. An idyllic sense, paintings seems colourful, but in a second glance it seems not that colourful. It shows something familiar yet unsure, unsettling our vision and somewhat inexplicable because screaming faces, wide open eyes, gestural hand signs, popular symbols, and imageries of facade as well as skeletons symbolize something beneath the colourful world we live. Vajira's painting have being inventing the world we live-in with a different angle as they are about the inventions of world. There is a pleasure and enjoyment to be had in viewing this work, but we cannot easily escape from the work as we invited to comprehend what is going on within these vibrant colour passages.  

 

       

Renaissance Revolution - Season 1 Ep. 2 - The rden of Earthly Delights: Credits Series Producer Paul Tilzey Presenter Matthew Collings Director Randall Wright Producer Randall Wright Writer Matthew Collings

PARADISE LOST - 12th to 26th April 2012 Broadcasting Place Gallery Leeds Metropolitan University

 

Internal body parts appear very often within the picture plane while the painfully twisted human hands and legs stretch out from the painting. They look extremely fragile. Butterflies and birds are exploding whilst they are flying. Flora and fauna cut out from natural science books and stencil cut printed black butterflies and insects juxtapose over and over within the painting. Un-evenly splashed colour patches pertain to be gunfire and flowers bleeding. These paintings lead us through the visual mash-up which symbolically characterize pain and fear. Barbed wire moves all the way through the painting plane achieving decorative impression. This is a new form of landscape: one which exemplifies terror and beauty in one place. The viewer of this series of landscapes takes in a false sense of beauty before the revelation of the displaced sense of agonising beauty, leading the viewer to assume that this may be far darker than first appeared.


I have illustrated my approaches (beauty and horror) without an exterior of earthly beauty or destructive photographic images. Without making causal connections with realistic representation, the visuals of my experiences and the memories of loss, absence and pain caused by war are symbolically illustrated in the middle ground of the painting. When the middle passage of the painting is composed with diverse visual materials, the edge of the painting becomes comparatively empty and plain space which provides boundaries to the painted space; the painted space itself appears to be as an island. This unearthly island impression appears within most of the paintings. This hypothetical island represents the tension created by difference as well as the beauty of collectiveness.


The effect of the painted space vibrates in-between the figurative form and the landscape effect. In one way this discrepancy creates an almost physical kind of impression within the painted space but, on a close inspection both of these impressions turn in to an anxious beauty. It is clear that these paintings are imaginations of painful experiences of war and political conflict and the opposing influence of nature and its beauty.


Priyantha Udagedara

CAD - Presentation 2011 - Leeds Metropolitan University

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Presentation 2011

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Lotus pond - 2011 Installation with rice, red lentils, resin human skull, candles and coca cola cans. Dimensions variable. Dimensions variable.