Nuwan Nalaka

In a painting from the ‘Prakriti’ series a flower vase stands on its ground, decorous and still, until the eye catches that the vessel has taken the form of Lajja Gauri, the ancient lotus-headed goddess shown in the birthing posture, and the still life of blossom and stem turns into a study of fertility, sexuality and feminine energy. Nuwan Nalaka works the surface in tempera, watercolour, Indian ink and wash, and the delicacy of those mediums is the whole strategy: the more demure the flowers appear, the more quietly the older meanings move beneath them. Restraint, in his hands, is how the charged subject is carried.

His full name is Subadrage Nuwan Nalaka, and he was born in 1981. His formation was Indian rather than domestic: he took a Bachelor of Visual Arts in painting at Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata in 2007 and returned to the same university for a Master of Fine Arts in painting, completed in 2013, so that the Bengal school’s long attachment to wash, line and mythological subject entered his hand at the source. That grounding shows in the discipline of his technique and in the ease with which he moves between Hindu and Buddhist ideas, drawing each out through image and symbol and the plants that recur across his work like a private vocabulary.

On his return to Sri Lanka he exhibited widely at home before settling into a gallery relationship. His first exhibition was held by the collector Malaka Talwatte, among the earliest to recognise and show his work. The solo shows that followed carried him through Colombo, Kandy and the Galle Fort: ‘Chiaroscuro’ and ‘Kolkata, a City of Vintage Tune’ at the Indian Cultural Centre in Colombo in 2006 and 2007, ‘Visions of a Nation’ at the Lionel Wendt in 2009, and a run of exhibitions at Paradise Road Galleries that closed with ‘Eternal Landscape’ in 2015. The alignment with Saskia Fernando Gallery followed, and with it the sequence for which he is now best known.

That sequence gathers across three named exhibitions at Saskia Fernando Gallery in Colombo: ‘Sutra’ in 2017, ‘Sansāra’ in 2020, and ‘Prakriti’ from 18 November to 13 December 2022. Read together the titles trace a single line of inquiry, from doctrine and the thread of teaching, through the cycle of birth and return, to nature itself as generative principle, each realised in the same repertoire of floral and vegetal form. In ‘Prakriti’ the flower vases stand in for the female figure, and the Tantric associations of Lajja Gauri, of fertility and sexuality, give the paintings their charge without ever raising their voice.

The restraint is the point. Nuwan handles subjects that many painters would treat with heat, and he treats them instead with the coolness of the wash and the patience of the miniature tradition behind him. The erotic in his work is grown rather than stated, allowed to unfold from petal and vessel until the viewer arrives at it unprompted, which is a harder thing to paint than confrontation and, in his hands, a more lasting one.