Curator's Note

Day to Day
The Art of Pradeep Thalawatte

by Anoli Perera

Pradeep Thalawatte’s artistic investigations incorporate highly urban situations, industrial material, mass produced, popular / celebrity icons and personal episodes of his life.  Absorption in urban allure, commenting on consumer anxieties and feelings of isolation/loneliness in the big city have been seen in the works of  many artists  in the later period of ‘90s Trend’ which marked the departure from the conventional use of art material and embracing the unconventional while finding meaning in the material itself.  On the exhibition Day to Day Thalawatte explains:

“The items chosen for the background in my work are mass produced and mass used items, and the images that are represented  are individuals with whom I tend to associate very closely. What is expressed within the background and foreground represents relationships that cannot be ignored or avoided. They are decided on personal selections, individual tastes, continued usage, authenticity and conveniences.” ¹

Today’s world with its mass productions, mass consumption, and the virtual world of cyber technologies, the image is repeated, digitized, dissected and rearranged.  Globalization, mass consumer markets and technologized cultural conditions triumph over all hierarchies in  its ability to offer infinite possibilities and manifestations of ‘fantasies’ and ‘dreams’ to all.  Billboards with perfect bodies backgrounding products offering divinity if used, rapidly changing TV commercials that offer situational scenes of fantastic possibilities are an integral part of this world into which the consumer is invited constantly. These fantastic possibilities are the ‘potential actualizations’ into reality. Thalawatte plays with these potentialities of actualization, the urban landscapes of advertisements and make-believe world where the most mundane action is blown up and fed to the masses as unique. Thalawatte’s exhibition Day to Day articulates self voyeuristically encoded narratives of day to day and mundane happening of his own life in a billboard format. Is he offering the audience a ‘potential actualization’ of the urban dream or ‘claiming’ a part of that urban dream – as a billboard celebrity - for himself on his own terms?

In a sense, his work parodies the advertising world and the ultra commercialization of products where everyday life and nonchalant actions of urban realities are appropriated, virtualized, digitized, cleaned up and rearranged as perfect fantasies; here the urban realities are simulated in a way that the copy becomes more real than the real. In a Baudrillardian sense, the simulacra have come to precede the real: “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”²  Thalawatte in his ‘Day to Day’ series purposefully places moments from his own real life frozen as digitized photos in place of this otherwise usually simulated images on backgrounds with repeated images of shampoo sachets, match boxes, liquor bottle caps (all of them prominently displaying their ‘brandings’) reminiscent of the Pop Art icon Any Warhol’s ‘Green Coca-Cola Bottles (1962). Here, the parody is that the real is consumed as the simulacra instead of the simulacra as real. 

Thalawatte’s work continuously plays with the idea of real and the simulated. His works done in 2006 show the artist playing with the notions of ‘celebrity icons’ where he constructed situations identical to certain moments taken from a ‘celebrity life’ and imposing himself in place of the actual celebrity. Through a documentary process of digital photos he constructs his own simulated celebrity narrative where he becomes the hero. His works ‘Hello’,  ‘Angelina  Jolie, Pradeep and Eminem’ (2006),  ‘Paparazzi’  (2006) and ‘Superman’ continuously  portray this idea of role playing, simulation and fantasy in dealing with the complexities of  consumer culture and youth identity. 

In his early works such as ‘Me and My Material World’, one could see his  interest in the contemporariness of material, texture, color, the exotic allure of the urban waste as well as the ‘trivial’ in the urban life:

 “I like very simple things and simple objects. They are mostly common material that are found everywhere in day-to-day life. Without any particular reason I get attracted to various glittery plastics and metals, and I use these things as art material in my work. In this sense, my work is constructed with things that are both trivial and throw away waste material while retaining their authenticity.”³

Other than the attraction of the ‘mass produced’, it is this interest in transforming the ‘trivial’ or the ‘mundane’ into ‘unique’ that continues in Talawatte’s recent works. This is seen in his work ‘Paparazzi’ (2006) where he takes a series of photographs from a mundane moment in Justin Timberlake’s ⁴ life (pumping petrol into his car) and reworking it. He replaces his own image in place of Timberlake’s, making it his unique fantasy. Here, he creates his own celebrity status (by the manipulation of images through technologies) as opposed to the notion of celebrity as something created by popularity and by mass acceptance. This also hints at the media interventions and manipulations in ‘making celebrities’ where popularity is ‘media fed’ than the actual popularity of celebrity icons.  What is also very obvious in his work is the self absorption with the artist’s own identity, and in his later work this manifests as an oscillation between reality and fantasy.  It seems to me that his work can be contextualized within the following idea articulated by Stuart Hall.

“Culture has ceased (…) to be a decorative addendum to the ‘hard world’ of production and things… Through design, technology and styling, ‘aesthetics’ has already penetrated the world of modern production.  Through marketing, layout and style, the ‘image’ provides the mode of representation and fictional narrativization of the (human) bodyon which so much of modern consumption depends … And the material world of commodities and technologies is profoundly cultural.” ⁵

Thalawatta’s work represents the future direction of art that would have much absorption in consumer culture, globalization, identity and multi-national business of popular icon making. However, in many ways, that future seems to have already arrived in so far as the youth everywhere are concerned.  
                               

Notes:

  1.Pradeep Thalawatte in conversation with Anoli Perera  on 15th November 2008, Red Dot Gallery, Ethul Kotte, Sri Lanka.

  2.Baudrillard, Jean (1988). Selected writings. Ed. Mark Poster, Cambridge, UK: Polity.
  3.Pradeep Thalawatte (2005). In, Contemporary Sri Lanka Art: Selected Works of Ten Artists, 2005  exhibition catalogue. Millesgarden: Stockholm.
  4.Jastin Thimberlake is known internationally as an American R&B/pop singer-songwriter, record producer, dancer and actor. He has won six Grammy Awards as well as an Emmy Award.

  5. Hall, Stuart (1996), Meaning of New Times. In, David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (ed.,), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routladge.

 Image Gallery: Day to Day

                            Apekesha: Kalak Evà men ..., (2008) 58.4x93 in ,Mix Media

                           Signal , (2008)Mix Media. 49.8 x 43.8 in.  

                           Panadol, (2008). Mix Media. 27.7 x 30.13 in.