Ismeth Raheem

Drawing and painting have been a near-daily ritual across most of Ismeth Raheem’s adult life, and the habit has outlasted every other discipline he has practised. On the page a building comes apart and reassembles itself against the logic of a Persian miniature: façades tilt, floors rise into view that no single eye could hold, tile patterns and flat fields of colour lock together until architectural space becomes a puzzle of geometry rather than a window of depth. To follow how a Sri Lankan architect arrived at this way of seeing, you have to begin with a man who refused the wall the modern world builds between one discipline and the next.

He was born on 18 October 1941, into a family of Jaffna-peninsula origin, and grew up in Colombo, where he made his beginning as an artist young. In the early 1960s, with his schoolmates Laki Senanayake and Turner Wickremasinghe, he formed the Young Artist Group, which held regular exhibitions in Colombo between 1962 and 1966. He trained in architecture at the Katubedde Technical College, then went on to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in the late 1960s, where he took up engraving, lithography and ceramics and widened a practice that had refused from the first to sit still in one medium.

The formative years came inside one of the defining workshops of Sri Lankan modernism. At the firm Edward, Reid and Begg through the 1960s and 1970s he worked alongside Geoffrey Bawa and the Danish architect Ulrik Plesner, in a circle that drew in Ena de Silva, Barbara Sansoni and Laki Senanayake, the makers who rethought the bond between art, craft and building in the decades after independence. His encounter with Ena de Silva turned him toward batik and toward an abstraction rooted in geometric design; in 1978 he established his own architectural firm, carrying the same ethos of synthesis into his own name.

His art has always run beside his history and his natural science rather than behind them. As a young man he gave himself to the study of birds, joined the Ceylon Bird Club and served as its President in the 1990s, and a great many of his paintings return to the birds of the island and to the early visual records of Ceylon’s natural history that he has researched as a historian. After his retirement the painting only intensified, and it has lately been gathered and shown: ARTRA devoted an edition, ‘Art and Design of Ismeth Raheem’, to a reported sixty-odd works across his career, and a recent exhibition at Cinnamon Life in Colombo, curated by Kasun Jayasuriya, set the drawings and paintings before a fresh audience.

The ritual at the drawing table holds it all in one place. A senior figure whose reach runs from Bawa’s studio to the Ceylon Bird Club, Raheem has spent a lifetime dissolving the borders others draw, and turning architecture, ornithology and history into a single, still-unfolding way of seeing.