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An exhibition of paintings by Chandra Malalgoda Bandaranayake will be held from February 21 to 24 at the Alliance Francaise, 11, Barnes Place, Colombo 7.

At a time of blatantly modernist stylistic experimentation in the arts with a preponderance of harrowing, joyless images concerned with personal suffering, Chandra Malalgoda Bandaranayake's retrospective exhibition of paintings and sculpture will be a welcome relief to the gallery going public of Colombo.

It is an exhibition that gives access into a recent past in Sri Lankan painting - the period between the 43 Group and the 1990s painters. It was a time when the likes of Stanley Kirinde, Senaka Senanayake, Tissa Ranasinghe and Sarath Chandrajeewa dominated the Colombo art scene.

These artists communicated more directly with a wider public, granting the art of painting its own autonomous pleasures free from larger responsibilities and burdens through a stringent painterly approach to their subject matter. The human body was central to their visual culture as it was in ancient Greece and classical Hindu sculpture.

The thinking among contemporary artists in Sri Lanka, more specifically the "generation of the 1990s," is one of discontent and criticism of the Sri Lanka they are currently experiencing, but also of the past which has led to this unsatisfactory situation. In their works they sketch some of the desiderata which this dissatisfaction is inspiring - they are the angry critics of a country which they passionately love.

Chandra Malalgoda Bandaranayake attempts to invest in her work a meditative stillness extricating art from the vicious circle of the ephemeral, the New and the sensational; working as it were, in a confident unselfconscious craft tradition. In her figurative works she seems to follow Charles Baudelaires' injunction "that which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal".

It is her concession to modernism. Her painting called Kurakkan Grinder is a good example of this. It is like (both in colour and conception) a Diego Rivera "Modesta", especially the one he called "La Nina Delphina Flores", where foreshortening is used to great effect.

If this work was initially undertaken as a portrait, because of the painter's very individual treatment of her subject matter, it translates into an independent work of art outside its context of origin, and cultural and historical distance. Chandra Malalgoda Bandaranayake's female figures, for most of the time, are given those exaggerated elongated eyes - the Meenakshi Eyes so favoured in Indian depictions of women.

It is now a common cliche in batik paintings and the kitsch that one comes across on the tourist trails both in India and Sri Lanka. However, Chandra Malalgoda Bandaranayake's female figures are beyond such stereotypes. What she achieves in them is, "presence", - icon-like moments taken out of time.

Other writers have referred to Chandra Malalgoda Bandaranayake's feminine sensibility, comparing her with women painters like Marie Laurencin and Amrita Shergil - perhaps Amrita Shergil more than Marie Laurencin? Pictures are dialogues with their viewers and comparisons are always rewarding.

T. S. Eliot said "comparisons and contrasts" are the chief tools of the critic, and today in free market economies also for the gossipy information so vital to the art trader. It is all part of the baggage of erudition to flatter the viewer's and the buyer's intelligence. But after all has been said and done, the quality, that distinguishes and animates Chandra Malalgoda Bandaranayake's art, for me is that it is the product of "and imagination more willing to receive the shapes of world".* She presents us with no grandiose overarching argument about the advance of any 'ism or some protean concept.

She has had no time for such speculation, having been a working woman who gardened, kept house and brought up three children. At the heart of her work is the simple, or not so simple fact of wanting to make her life special - the crucial motor in most Human change that has shaped Humankind.

* Holderlin, Letter to Neuffer 1797 - Professor S. B. Dissanayake, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. 1999

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