Koralegedera Pushpakumara

“My art is about life as it is spent day to day. It is primarily a visual diary with an opening for interpretation and a space for thinking about life as it passes by. For me, my life is something to be thought about and therefore it is a form of thought as well” – Koralegedara Pushpakumara-

Koralegedera Pushpakumara  is one of the early artists influenced by the 90s Trend. His work narrated the story of the ‘isolated individual’ in the highly chaotic landscape of Sri Lankan urban society.  Coming from Kandy, a well known regional town, he established his artist’s life in Colombo. The anxieties of ‘distancing’  from home in such a situation and the confrontations of urban Colombo  is transcribed in his work as an eternally  lonely figure  that becomes a recurring image in his early series of work (Man , the Bouquet  and Blue Background- 2002) .   His works done in the period 2002 which predominates the thematic of ‘isolated individual’  represent  and speak of the anxieties not only of  himself  but also of a  generation of artists in a similar predicament.  Pushpakumara’s latter works (Unveiling the Contradiction Series) move away from this macro representations and embarks upon an introversive trajectory  where he uses his canvas as his visual diary that record  day to day negotiations of life as visual statements. Micro issues and small things in life are blown up large as important human issues in an attempt to present them as something important to the individual, the artist. The experiential recordings in  Pushpakumara’s canvas have a certain immediacy and an attempt to move away from the mega narrative tendencies. But what is interesting in Pushpakumara’s work is that while he employs an  approach to be self-absorptive as a way of distancing from the outside chaos to be private,  he represents his own predicament as a volatile internally vortextual world, thereby aligning the external and the internal on the same predicament.  The broken brush strokes, the sense of spontaneity and incompleteness implies a particular tension between the artist and the canvas which questions ‘when is an artwork final?’  Such maneuvers locate Pushpakumara’s work within an a-structural  or an anti-structural thesis.
-Anoli Perera-

Reference: Six Degrees of Seperation: Choas, Congruence and Collaboration, 2008, exhibition catalouge, Red Dot Gallery: Pitakotte.