IVAN PERIES (1921-1988)

Describing Ivan Peries paintings of the mid 1950s as some of his best work, his biographer Senake Bandaranayake notes that it is an “inner spirit of place” that animates these pictures rather than an overt sense of movement. “This spirit, sometimes highly charged, dramatic, even violent, sometimes quiet, gentle, delicate, almost musical, often (in the best pictures) both things at once, is the most profound experience that these paintings have to offer us. Their duality, this amalgam, as it were, of two opposite states of being obtains right through the 30 years of painting represented here [...] Now, in his full maturity, refreshed by his return to Ceylon and yet sufficiently removed in time from it to have absorbed and digested the experience, with the paintings of this period [...] Peries has completely mastered his vision and his material. These are amongst his most achieved work, a completely original contribution to landscape painting” (S. Bandaranayake, ‘Ivan Peries: (Paintings 1939–1969) The Predicament of the Bourgeois Artist in the Societies of the Third World’, Third Text, Vol. 1, Issue 2, 1987, unpaginated).