Dreaming of Candies and Guns: Anupa Perera

Existing in a realm far removed from the tactile reality of the surroundings, Anupa Perera’s still-life paintings are whimsically insidious while occasionally serving as snapshots of romanticised pathos. Dreaming of Candies and Guns toys with the viewer’s sensibility. It judges their ability to perceive. Perera’s paintings often act as cyphers, waiting to be decoded by the viewer.

The mise-en-scène created by Perera offers insight into the peculiar lens through which the artist views the world. His practice is rooted in attempts to capture mundane items while emphasising the correlation between light, composition, and colour. However, in Perera’s work, these quotidian objects become narrative devices that subtly essay his observations of the everyday.

Laced with a sense of nostalgia, Perera’s still-life compositions often draw from the rustic life of the island’s hinterlands. Cheap plastic buckets, plain-coloured porcelain cups, and wooden mortars and pestles offer a charming picture of domesticity. Interjected with blue olives and luscious apples, it becomes an ironic play on the ideas of abundance often depicted within the genre. Instead of romanticising the idyllic nature of rural existence, the artist’s subversion of the theme offers a wry commentary on the struggles that define life in these regions.

Inspired by the artist’s observations of pastoral life, Tragedy of the Tilth examines the intertwined relationship between a bountiful harvest and the impact of hazardous pesticides. The painting depicts an empty bottle drained of its toxic contents alongside an animal skull and a dead twig. The pile of coins serves as a bleak reminder of the community’s helplessness as they risk the very futures they struggle to sustain.

Perera tends to play on the disconnect between reality and the subjects of his paintings—a tension made more evident by the inherent characteristics of the still-life genre. This tension especially plays out in his treatment of the Self-Portrait. Unlike typical portraits that capture the characteristics of an individual with animated liveliness, Perera renders his subject lifeless, akin to the inanimate objects in his still-life paintings. Instead, he emphasises the materiality of the satin sarong against the humble interiors, rendering the traditional theme of portraiture obsolete. It shifts the gaze from the figure to the objects in the painting while leaving room to contemplate the themes of vanity such images depict.

In Perera’s peculiar imagination, Freedom takes the form of incomprehensible chaos. Levitating in defiance of gravity, a bucket of water remains still while paper boats float in disarray. Filtered through the image of a plastic toy, the Crying Unicorn contemplates a civilisation desensitised to war, in which children become victims in a geopolitical playground of death and violence. The images rest on the giddy dissonance where logic seemingly disintegrates.

Whimsy becomes a tool through which the viewer is prompted to rethink the themes surrounding the subject. Disdain, masked by a playful unpredictability, becomes one of the tools at Anupa Perera’s disposal, through which the artist employs the inert medium of still life painting to orchestrate conversations on political unrest, environmental issues, and the human condition.