ARTIST STATEMENT

Untitled 13.1.0 (Detail)

As a Sri Lankan native, ancient Ceylonese art has had a profound impact on my understanding of space, colour and line. While figural representation has remained dominant in Ceylonese art, my aim is to explore a new form of figuration by introducing a profound sense of physical space. My body of work conceptually explores figural abstraction through “less is more”; addition through subtraction enables me to abstractly combine figural elements that visually depend on a repetitive process. Instead of inventing a subject matter that dictates how I must paint, I allow multiple pours to produce a composition to which I intuitively respond by means of a simple, hard-edged brushstroke. My system determines that color and form are intrinsically connected. The colourform thus establishes an all-over composition creating a uniform surface that is spatially enhanced by the layered canvases. In practice I do not treat the composition as a work in progress but rather as a creative thought in progress. By bearing no title, the painting births an identity of its own, enabling an open-ended visual dialogue between painting and viewer.

DJ Perera

---