Artist's Statement
Kesara Ratnavibhushana has an expansive photographic practice with interconnected approaches across art and editorial spheres. For the last two decades he has been led by emotional but precise narrative reportage that has spanned from his experiences documenting experimental events and happenings, exclusive and intimate family occasions, exceptional architecture and performances to studio based photographic series for exhibition. He is also highly attuned to the natural and built environments of our world, making several extensive projects that reflect on encounters with plants, landscape and cities; all of which he sees as inexorably linked in a cyclical dance of cosmic beauty, destruction and regeneration.
He is motivated by holistic life systems such as ecological biodiversity and Ayurvedic healing. He sees both as inherently Sri Lankan themes, ones that he has revisited with new understanding on his return home, into the post war situation in the country since 2008. In his work he has embraced this wave of change over the last ten years with several projects focusing on the region’s physical and cultural characteristics, including spiritual practices, vernacular architecture and urban sprawl.
He works with large-scale prints often introducing digital colour isolation to bring out key elements that convey an emotional connection to the subject matter or resulting composition.
His formative years were immersed in Tropical Modernism through the progressive architecture scene around his father Anura Ratnavibhushana and Geoffery Bawa, with further modernist influences coming in through appreciation of the refined approaches of Edward Weston and Tina Modotti.
His photographs somehow find the power in the subject, which sings out in the resulting print, whether that be a holy man with spinning lights, a building trying to prevail over the might of nature, or the permeable boundaries of coastal environments. This energy comes through even when working on a micro level, with highly choreographed monochrome studies of leaf structures where a few millimetres detail becomes a striking architectural landscape.