Trapped in a Broken Dream, I Still Think of You : Jagath Weerasignhe

Trapped in a Broken Dream, I Still Think of You carries the weight of an artist’s disillusionment. It is resonant with the disaffection that occupied Jagath Weerasinghe’s intellectual life,  as he became acutely aware of the labyrinthine structures that create the conditions for violence in our contemporary world. Presenting a critical and philosophical engagement with systemic issues that shape global conflicts, the exhibition reveals the emotional undercurrents that lie beneath the artist’s intellectual inquiry. The presentation examines the manner in which the texture and tonality of visual language has shifted in the subjects the artist recurrently engages with.

Marked by vulnerable admissions of fear and longing, the overcast skies filled with dread, oceans rolling red with the blood of victims, and figures recoiling into themselves carrying the weight of systemic injustice reveal the clamour that defined the artist’s cathartic process. It burns with fury, retreats into infinite vastness amidst uncertainty and seeks contentment amongst the calming blue waves of the ocean.  At the artist’s studio, a stretch of paddy fields runs for yards, with the vast open sky above it. Yet in the political climate the artist is witness to, the verdant green shrivels, and the sky is overcast, setting the artist's internal world at odds with the immediate reality around him.  

While the series Shiva from the artist’s early practice were isolated responses to events in Sri Lanka’s sociocultural environment, the current version of the God of Dance and Destruction embodies a righteousness that justifies the violence across the globe as moral and ideological necessity. Shiva embodies a rage that is directed inwards as much as it is directed outwards. The rage and injustice the artist feels seeps through the form of Shiva, and colours the ocean red.

When Weerasinghe returns to the subject of the mothers of the disappeared in the series, Fury, the artist commits to paper a flurry of gestures that leaps on the surface like uncontrolled fire. The angst of women whose wait for their loved ones is stretching into two decades since the end of the civil war  dissolves into the fluid movement of ink carrying the gravitas of a plea that has morphed into rage.