Redefining Paradise, 2018, Priyantha Udagedara
Mixed media on canvas, 100cm x 100cm x 6
Provenance: Saskia Fernando Gallery, Colombo.
Priyantha Udagedara was born in Sri Lanka and the experiences of the civil and political turmoil during his youth have greatly influenced his work. "My art is a new form of landscape, one which exemplifies terror and beauty in one place. The viewer takes in a false sense of beauty before the revelation of the displaced sense of agonising beauty.” While on first view, Udagedara’s represent tropical paradise, when the viewer looks more closely, we see fragmented human body parts combined with splattered paint. This morbid juxtaposition of beauty, chaos and agony provides an altered story to the previously perceived sense of beauty (1).
Produced on commission, Redefining Paradise can be considered part of Priyantha Udagedara’s ‘Orientalism’ exhibition where he endeavours “to unearth -and concurrently interpret- what is beneath the deception of the exoticism in brazen display.” Udagedara again uses the floral veneers, and use of distance as previous collections in this exhibition, to observe the dark secrets hiding under the surface (2).