Ruwan Prasanna’s solo exhibition Kaze no Iro was opened at Saskia Fernando Gallery, Colombo 7 on Thursday, and will conclude on November 27. The exhibition is open daily from 10 am to 6pm.
Bathed in deep azure, rich yellows and lush greens, this latest series continues the artist’s celebration of the transient phenomena of nature as he reimagines the interaction between wind and nature – one that sways between soft caresses and unrestrainable chaos.
In this latest series of works by the artist the perceptibility of the winds manifests – unpredictable and insurmountable – as it passes through the natural realm. It is this quality that Ruwan Prasanna attempts to capture, providing a visual sensibility to an unseen phenomenon. Kaze no Iro marks a progression in Prasanna’s practice as he builds on the bright and playful colour palette of his previous solo exhibition Aluyama. The artist conceptualises the wind in all its incarnations from the whimsy of the gentle breeze to the calamitous rage of gale force winds.
In Ruwan Prasanna’s work, the limitless entity that is the wind appears to escape past the bounds of the canvas. The immense scale presents a momentary snapshot of the fleeting wind, suggesting movement that compels the viewer to move along with it. The artist locates the beauty of the wind as strange and overwhelming, captured in the rhythmic interplay of colours and layered brushstrokes. Prasanna is sensitive to the way in which the colours in nature fuse together and take shape, lending the wind a tangibility that is familiar.
Ruwan Prasanna has distinguished himself as one of Sri Lanka’s foremost abstract painters. Born in Galle, Prasana studied Fine Art at the University of Kelaniya before pursuing a career in advertising. His oeuvre with its focus on ephemerality and the natural order offers a deviation from commentary and political constructions, and instead engages the viewer in the simple pleasures. His work is not bounded by trend or tradition, for Prasana, the canvas is a place to explore his own sentiment and to grapple with temporality.
In his 2018 series Komorebi, the artist represented the transitory play of light and colour in the different stages of the sunset, a motif continued in his Twilight series that experimented with a darker colour palette in representing the contrast of the skies at twilight. Kaze no Iro represents the amalgamation of Prasanna’s signature haptic, gestural brushwork and lively colour palette, honed through his extensive practice which moves into the examination of transitory motion in the natural realm.
