Mahen Perera

Mahen Perera treats a painting as something to be taken apart. Born in 1977, he works against the flat, framed surface, ripping, tying, knotting and stitching the picture until it swells into a tactile object with a body of its own; the pictorial frame is extended, delicately shaped or forcefully misshapen, into a structure that sits between painting and sculpture.

The result is a practice about material as much as image, patient in its manipulation and restless about the limits of the medium. He trained at the National Design Centre and has continued his fine-art study at LASALLE, and works out of Colombo, among the artists testing what painting can still be made to do.

His work can be seen on Ocula.