An artist's negotiation with technology

In his first solo in India, Christopher Kulendran Thomas combines history, art, technology and the human experience to produce chaotic, bold works

- Radhika Iyengar

An inverted figure is caught reeling, falling head first in what can be construed to be a pool of red. The knobbly body, with its twisted torso and flailing limbs, appears suspended in time. The painting, defined by chaotic brushstrokes and a rich colour palette (splashes of cayenne, brown and orange), seems to be writhing in agony. Another painting features colours of forest green, mustard, and smudges of rust, where in the foreground, entwined figures that embody a sense of tragedy, lie.

An artist of Tamil heritage, Christopher Kulendran Thomas grew up in London after his family left Sri Lanka amidst intensifying ethnic violence that led to the civil war between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority. It was this experience that shaped his political awareness and artistic consciousness.

Exhale, his first solo exhibition in India, held at Experimenter gallery in Mumbai, features a collection of paintings that has a visceral effect on its viewers. Faceless, shape-shifting figures are recurring protagonists; canvases are slapped with thick layers of paint, and are marked by aggressive scratches and gestural brushwork. Kulendran Thomas's choice of colours, too, belong to something personal. "The red and brown colours that run through the show at Experimenter, remind me of the red clay earth of the Tamil homeland in the north and east of what is now Sri Lanka," he says.

While growing up, Kulendran Thomas didn't want to be an artist. "I didn't even know it was something you could be," he says. "I started making things out of desperation really, because I couldn't speak. I had a debilitating stutter that years of speech therapy didn't help. But when I started making things in my late teens, that somehow gave me the confidence to reverse-engineer how speaking works and to train myself how to do it." It was a therapeutic process which became the means for him to process or respond to the tumultuous collective history of his parents' motherland.