In-Between Matter and Materiality curatorial note In-Between Matter and Materiality is an exhibition of a new body of work created by the students at the final level in the department of painting. The exhibition highlights a group of young artists’ approaches to experimentation with matter and materiality in their studio practice. The studio practice has allowed them to find the methodologies and possibilities for the evolution of their works. The body of work results from the process evolved from the act of probing, questioning, responding, situating, constructing and deconstructing different matters and materials encountered by these young artists. This collection of work displayed on the three floors in the JDA Perera Gallery implies a character of visual poetry present in every work and its relationship to the whole body of work. Such intimacy among the works evokes a sense of order and disorder, and differences and repetitions in the visual language developed by each artist. The v
This text is dedicated to an extraordinary art teacher, former faculty (Department of Painting, Faculty of Visual Arts) and a modern painter in Sri Lanka W.A. Ariyasena who died at 91 (?) on August 8, 2022. When I heard the news about the death of this wonderful personality, it took me back to some traces that he left on his journey. An object ( a large blue colour container) that I saw at his studio in 2020 is not a work of art that he intentionally created, but it is something that the artist left during the act of painting as an unconscious habit of mark making. These energetic traces of his gestures embodying his presence and absence in the present context is the hidden energy of his language of art and teaching. His conversation was always full of arts, literature, music and cinema that he absorbed by travelling around Europe and living in the discourse of his contemporaries (J.D.A Perera, Mahagamasekara, David Paynter, Stanley Abesinghe, H.A. Karunarathne, Albert Dharmasiri..)