Sanjeewa Kumara

A six-legged elephant stands in a garden of flowers that grow nowhere on earth, a hunter drifts above it with no ground to hold him, and every line of the picture refuses the perspective that Europe once taught the tropics to admire. This is the country Sanjeewa Kumara paints: a place assembled from Sri Lankan history, colonial memory and the debris of imported pop culture, governed by rules he sets himself. To understand why a painter should build a whole world on the deliberate rejection of the rules he was trained in, you have to start with his central claim, that his art is not Western, and was never meant to be.

He was born in Colombo in 1971 and later took a master’s degree in the Netherlands, so the European canon was a language he knew from the inside before he chose to work against it. He teaches as a visiting lecturer in the visual-arts unit at the University of Kelaniya. From early on he set aside the conventions a fine-art education holds sacred: pictorial balance, spatial depth, the single vanishing point. In their place he put a flat, crowded, high-coloured surface where scale and gravity answer to the story rather than to the eye, and he described the result, with some mischief, as a non-Western Western art.

The strange menagerie is the argument made visible. His canvases work as a reservoir of images, drawn from the island’s past and from the collision between Western popular culture and a South Asian post-colonial legacy, and he uses that collision to ask what the ‘self’ becomes when two cultures are forced onto one plane. He calls the works simply ‘pictures’, a word that keeps them clear of European hierarchies of genre, and lets the fable carry the weight: the animals of a bygone world, the invented iconography, the private languages he says only painters speak. The lushness is not decoration; it is the medium through which a serious question about identity is put.

That position has carried well beyond Colombo. Sanjeewa has shown for two decades with Paradise Road Galleries, with solo exhibitions there in 2002, 2003 and 2013. His work was included in ‘Artful Resistance: Contemporary Art from Sri Lanka’ at the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna in 2008, in the first Colombo Art Biennale in 2009, and in ‘Contemporary Art from Sri Lanka’ at Asia House in London in 2011, the first international survey of the island’s leading contemporary artists after the end of the war.

For all that reach, the paintings keep returning to the same impossible animal in its impossible garden: a picture that will not stand in perspective, made by an artist who decided that the refusal was the point.