Gayan Prageeth

A sheet of rice paper thin enough to tear at a touch lies over a field of bright acrylic, and Gayan Prageeth draws his fine ink line across it, so that a single surface begins to carry two lives at once: the almost decorative paint glowing underneath, and the sharp linear commentary laid on top. He works in that gap between the delicate and the biting, and from it he has built a sustained body of political and environmental satire that reads the recent history of the island without softening it. To see why he should trust so hard a record to so fragile a ground, it helps to follow what he asks the tissue to hold.

He was born in 1980 in Horana, the market town south of Colombo, and works today from the capital, where he is represented by Saskia Fernando Gallery. His raw material is a stock of recognisably Sri Lankan signs, the iconography of state, ritual and the street, which he arranges and reworks until their familiar authority begins to slip. In his installations he carries the same method into three dimensions, folding ready-made and found materials into quiet observations on the country’s ethnic divisions, so that ordinary objects are asked to hold an argument.

The war and its long aftermath run through everything. In ‘Extravagance’, shown at Saskia Fernando Gallery in 2015, he treated post-war Colombo as a kind of political carnival, all appetite and display, and let the pageantry indict itself; ‘Since 1983’, the following year, turned back to the eruption of the conflict, holding the rupture in view through geometric symbolism and installation. By ‘Eyes Only’, at the same gallery from 3 February to 3 March 2021, the method had sharpened: he set images of destruction inside surreal, dreamlike settings, so that beauty and violence shared the one frame, and the grip of corruption on public life was felt rather than merely stated.

The reach extends past Colombo. In 2019 the work travelled to Los Angeles for ‘Crossing Place: Contemporary Art from Sri Lanka’ at Baik Art, from 20 April to 1 June, one of the exhibitions that carried a generation of Sri Lankan practice to a Californian audience and set Gayan’s satirical language beside that of his peers.

What holds it together is a temperament rather than a slogan. Gayan is a satirist in the older sense, a maker who laughs in order to look harder, whose humour is the visible surface of a real disquiet about power, memory and the land. The rice paper is the argument as much as the ink it carries: on a sheet that could give way at a touch, he keeps insisting the record be told plainly, and that the fragile thing is strong enough, after all, to hold it.