Jagath Ravindra

He was trained to lift what the ground had kept for centuries, the buried and the durable, and to read it; then he set that work aside and took up a brush to chase the one thing that refuses to stay. Jagath Ravindra holds a postgraduate diploma in archaeology, a discipline built on the recovery of the fixed, and he has spent his painting life on its exact opposite: the passing moment, the shift of light, the human body caught between one state and the next.

The sequence of his formation reads almost like an argument with himself. He was born in 1963 at Madampe, on the island’s western coastal belt, took his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Aesthetics of the University of Kelaniya in 1990, followed it with the postgraduate diploma in archaeology in 1991, and much later added a Master of Social Sciences (Philosophy) from the same university in 2014. Art, then the study of what survives in the ground, then the study of ideas: a painter who came up through material culture and philosophy alike, and who has given as much of his life to teaching art as to making it, latterly as Dean of the Faculty of Visual Arts at the University of the Visual and Performing Arts in Colombo.

The work is where the two impulses meet and the fleeting wins. His subject has stayed constant, the human figure and the body, treated less as portraiture than as a vehicle for memory, spirituality and an existence held in common rather than tied to one creed. The handling sits between two inheritances, the Impressionist attention to fleeting light and the freer visual language of abstraction, built up through colour set against colour and a warmth of feeling that carries something of the island’s own heat; the result reads as introspection given public form, a single moment of feeling raised to something a viewer can stand inside. The archaeologist’s instinct to preserve is still there, turned now onto a subject that can be preserved only in paint.

That conviction has travelled. He showed at the Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka in 2001, 2006 and 2008, at Serendipity’s October Gallery showing in London in 2002, at XVA Gallery in Dubai in 2005 and 2007, at The Noble Sage Art Gallery in London in 2006, at the Colombo Biennale in 2009, at the 6th Silk Road International Art Exhibition in Xi’an in 2019, and most recently in ‘Pivot Glide Echo’ at KALĀ in Colombo in 2025; his work has entered the permanent collections of the Xi’an Art Museum and the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, and he is represented by Saskia Fernando Gallery in Colombo.

For all the range of that record, the centre of the work stays close to home in Angoda, where he lives and paints: a body, a colour, a moment about to pass. Jagath has built a long practice out of the very thing his archaeology could never hold, the instant itself, and out of the patient conviction that a painting is the right instrument for keeping it.