‘Nice’ is not what I want to hear

Angu Rajendran

* Venue: Barefoot Gallery

* Dates: February 15 to March 10

* Timings: Weekdays 10 am to 7pm, Sundays 11am to 5pm

The Landscape of Change

“Unhurried Groundswell” Offers Familiar and Unexpected Visions

Reviewed by Elizabeth Schwyzer

From Adam’s Peak to Sigiriya Rock to the steep terrain of hill country, Sri Lanka’s land rolls and buckles. Like the waters that surround the island, the ground is varied and unpredictable: here pushing into peaks, there subsiding into verdant fields. It’s against this shifting landscape that four artists present their distinct visions. Now on view at the Barefoot Gallery, Colombo, Unhurried Groundswell offers sculpture, paintings, and drawings that despite their differences share common themes: the primacy of the natural world, the importance of perspective, and the inevitability of change.

Muhanned Cader views nature through the frame of the human form. Cader’s graphite drawings and acrylic paintings are small in scale, and displayed as they are here in two long lines, they read almost as frames in a silent film. Each work focuses on a single shape hovering in white space. Some are identifiable as bodies or parts of bodies, and each is filled with delicate seascapes: cloud strewn skies and flat, reflective waters.

Here is a child’s head, there, a one- armed torso. As you step closer, the outline becomes less important and the interior landscape seems to widen, as if you’re approaching a series of windows to the sea. In the grey-scale of graphite, there’s an expansive quiet to these images. In paint, they blossom into the blues, greens, lavenders, and pinks of a Sri Lankan sunset.

Colors feature too in the work of Mariah Lookman, though they’re not immediately apparent. 14 sheets of paper hang in a row, each one filled top to bottom with text and numbered like pages in a book. Linger with these lists, and themes begin to emerge.

Page two is full of words that describe landscape and location—“high, mountain, peak, avalanche”—while page eight lists peoples of the world: “Apache, Moor, Berber, Zuni, Kurd.” The images here are implied rather than realized, and Lookman’s dense lists force the viewer to read selectively. Her work is a study in sight and focus—what we see when flooded with excess information, and what we miss.

In a parallel process, Alex Stewart fills his frames with highly detailed visions, leaving little room for white space. On one wall, 48 of his paintings are hung like a quilt. From a distance, there’s a pleasing sense of repeated elements: black bars resembling railway ties and circular forms like clusters of fruits. At close range, these works open up into miniature whimsical worlds where tall-hatted elves clamber tree trunks and peek out from behind the branches. The sense of loose narrative and passages of finely wrought detail here are reminiscent of medieval illuminated manuscripts, and like such illustrations, they use scenes from the natural world to suggest the passage of time.

At the opposite end of the gallery sits a squat, four-sided structure made from bamboo peelings sewn together. London-based Elizabeth Porter is a regular visitor to Sri Lanka, and often sources her materials from nature. Here, the effect is pleasingly domestic and at the same time unsettling; this house could never withstand the elements. Across the gallery, Porter has displayed a collection much smaller items.

From a distance, one might mistake them for abstract shapes, but closer inspection brings a shock of recognition. Those tight balls of grasses with protrusions at the top turn out to be grenades. Dark green tea leaves have been painstakingly stitched together in the unmistakable likeness of a machine gun.

Above the items themselves hang detailed watercolor paintings of the same; comparison between the painting and object itself reveals the way the leaves have begun to stiffen, darken, and molder. In these deceptively simple paintings, Porter achieves a startling confluence of feminine and masculine, natural and man-made, beauty and violence—nothing less than a portrait of a nation. Through cycles of creation and destruction, Porter suggests; nature endures.

Some of the exhibits that will be showcased at Unhurried Groundswell. Pictures by Nissanka Wijeratne

Here is a real challenge. Art and sculpture at Unhurried Groundswell – an exhibition at Barefoot gallery is indeed art at its most thinking moments.

Totally suited to the multi-tasking, highly optimized thought processes of today, the four artists exhibiting together have found their common thread. Theirs is indeed ‘thinking art.’

Muhanned Cader, Mariah Lookman, Elizabeth Porter and Alex Stewart are not unfamiliar to Sri Lanka. Each of them is an established artist in his or her own right. Muhanned is from Galle and is well known for his unusual charcoal and water colour figurine landscapes Muhanned is very vehement about the break from the traditional landscape. At first sight, his drawings and paintings look like blotchy islands but then it definitely warrants a second, a third and further looks.

Amazing! The figure shaped islands, each a distinct form reveals a landscape within. It truly serves the two dimensional aspect of the eye. Just when you think, that you have figured out the figures in the landscapes of the charcoal drawings, there you go again with the water colours. More delightful! You can’t just look at one. You have to look at them all. Each one wows you as you have a eureka moment with each aspect of it.

Muhanned’s friends are all from Oxford, UK. They have always been inspired by each others’ works. All their works that use different mediums and different themes have more to it than meets the eye the first time around. You have to think. Not what the artist is trying to say but simply what the painting contains. Each painting can stand on its own but comes together as a whole.

Alex Stewart for example has a set of paintings that can be re-arranged any which way and would still have a sequence. Much like a set of Tarot cards his paintings all contain common elements of the First Angel, the Second Angel, The Fool, the Silhouettes, the Pods, the Common Man and the Rock.

As the most senior member of the group, Alex Stewart says, ‘when people look at our art, nice is not the word I want to hear. Even if people say ‘I hate it’ I will be happy. I want people to react to my work. Not just say nice. Nice is such an ambiguous word. And our paintings are not ambiguous. I want them to strike a chord.’

According to Alex the multiple elements combine in numerous ways, an ever-shifting landscape with each combination suggesting a different story, yet always confined within the exterior of the rock itself. Each image can stand alone or as a souvenir of the whole. But each of the 48 paintings deserves a close look and a few moments of thought from the onlooker. As an art lover commented, “You can’t just own one of Alex’s paintings. You must have two or more.”

Elizabeth Porter is a gentle sculptor who uses leaves to sculpt. She has caught her non-permanent sculptures of guns and grenades made from tea leaves, into the more permanent works of art that hang from the walls. She brings her soft feminine touch to the violent aggressive weapons producing a contrasting combinations of paintings.

If a picture could paint a thousand words, it would be by Mariah Lookman. She has produced 14 lists of words. As you read each list, the colours and paints come alive. Unusual, different and just black words on white paper that create such vividly delightful paintings in the mind’s eye!

As the world of smartphones, laptops and ipads moves forward, ‘Unhurried Groundswell’ is a sampling of the future world of Art and Sculpture. A must see for the curious mind.

Elizabeth Schwyzer is an art critic, from the Santa Barbara Independent in California. During her visit to Sri Lanka, she wrote specially for The Daily News.