“The title Conservatory emerged during the curation process, while being effortlessly and spontaneously true to the magic of Poesia. Therefore, it inhibits certain essential truths of my subjective phenomenological observations of these works up close. This particular medium allows “conservation” to take place naturally. It both visually and aesthetically evokes and embodies a British Conservatory Greenhouse, where a diverse garden of flora from distant lands meet in harmony. What does it conserve?

Unlike the slow, breath-bound processes inherent to oil painting, where pigment, oil, and time enact a sensuous meditation on temporality, both Ink and Acrylic (whether in Pigment Pen form or Viscous Fluid) embody a very different modus operandi. Their ontological constitution resists temporal unfolding: they dry swiftly, their chroma assertive, and their facture immediate. What emerges from such materials is a quality of expressive directness: the mark, once made, is irreversible. In this sense, the medium itself exerts an a priori force on the image's ontology, permanence, certitude, and existential finality.

This quality lends itself to what one might term an écriture plastique, [a plastic writing] that is confident, assertive, and assured, especially when articulated through Gestural, Rhythmic or automatist Mark-Making. Arjuna’s works in Ink and Acrylic, particularly within the Conservatory series, demonstrate this aesthetic modality. The quick-drying nature of the media prohibits reworking in the traditional sense, thus forcing each mark to embody its full telos the moment it is inscribed. The gesture becomes a rhythmic, temporal event, a decisive manifestation of thought-as-form in space. Here, one finds echoes of Tachisme, Action Painting, and even Affekt-Malerei, yet he is neither purely European nor American in lineage. It is born of his unique Svabhāva, the essential inner nature of materials in intimate dialogue with memory, breath, and perception.

Where staining is employed, especially in underlayers, the affect shifts dramatically. These atmospheric veils, often achieved through diluted ink, form what could be called the Grundton, the base tonality or ambient vibration of the image. This substratum, however, is not akin to the cerebral blending or smudging seen in Arjuna’s Soft-Pastel work. Instead, these stains function as patina affectiva, an affective patina that sets the emotive register of the scene. Take, for instance, "The Idle Man" (2025) or "Lost Timath" (2024), where the gradated washes operate almost like a visual drone or Tanpura, sustaining the emotional resonance upon which the figural motifs rise.

Much has been misunderstood by ill-equipped critics who, failing to grasp form, facture, and morphê, resort to derivative psychoanalytic readings. One such critic opined that Arjuna's foliage symbolises a nostalgic yearning for lost village life. This misreading, perhaps forgivable by virtue of blissful ignorance, is in fact a projection, reminiscent of the flawed Verlust Paradigma (the loss-paradigm) so often imposed on diasporic artists. Julian Bell responded aptly: "To talk of ‘Displacement’ is to suggest that Places exist."¹ Arjuna’s foliage, though vegetal in appearance, is neither tropical nor local. It is a synthetic expression of interior perception, not ethnobotanical reference (thus, neither suited for their ill-dreamt theories of Diasporic Dissonance). This is Ghettoisation at best. If one looks for lazy Žižekian psycho-babble, it’s assured they will quite easily find it.  

While Arjuna was born in Matale, Central Sri Lanka, he grew up in the capital, Colombo, amidst metropolitan communities, gas fumes, and rhythms of the bustling streets. An urbanite through and through, his preferred studio today is situated amidst the multicultural cacophony of Ponders End High Street, in Suburban North London. Not some pastoral retreat in Cornwall. This, in itself, reveals a conceptual fidelity to la ville moderne, where noise and complexity are sublimated into visual harmony.

If-pray-their two-bit theories [rejected] from asylms may still yield some valuable observational wisdom, they might identify connotations of yearning for English flora, once encountered in some distant Yorkish grotto. His vegetal marks, then, are not indexical signs of indigenous flora but rather gestures toward perceptual foliage. Perhaps recalling oak, beech, birch, or croton, not because of direct observation, but because of sensorial osmosis. These are not motifs, but what Deleuze might call Haecceities [singular events of becoming] individuated through their Temporal & Spatial Resonance.²

Indeed, Julian Bell’s insight aligns with Heidegger’s phenomenology: Ort (place) is not geometrical but experiential; Disclosed through Dasein’s attunement to Being. Arjuna's works offer interior landscapes, visual phenomenologies of memory-space, shaped by embodied recollection. Each mark arises from what Abhinavagupta termed Camatkāra: Aesthetic Wonder born of the fusion of the viewer’s inner experience with the artist’s vision.³ This is crucial: the image is not a depiction but a transmission.

In works such as "Where are you?" (2024) and "Where is Tushma?" (2024), the compositional schema forms a rhythmos — a visible pulse — coalescing toward the lower register of the standing figure, where Mark, memory, and meaning converge. Rudolf Arnheim’s Art and Visual Perception offers a compelling framework here: what we see as Balance (of [in] the eye) is a dynamic equilibrium, a Gestalt created through perceptual tensions.⁴ These works achieve visual consonance not by symmetry but by Gewichtung, a weighting of forms that creates a felt sense of resolution.

The stained ground layers are not merely chromatic backdrops. They are mood-resonances: Svarabhāvas, that provide the tonal aether through which the upper forms emerge. Building from memory and embodied feeling, Arjuna draws upon a lifetime of sketchbook studies, life drawing, and techne refined into phronesis: practical wisdom. The figure is not illustrated; it is evoked. Each gestural line is a condensation of time, experience, and intentionality.

Thus, the permanence of the ink and acrylic medium - non-reworkable, lacking the plasticity of oil or pastel - becomes a philosophical proposition. These marks do not merely record thought; they instantiate it. They are not expressions of fleeting emotion but crystallisations of interior eventfulness. Here, time unfolds vertically: in layers. And each layer is a palimpsest of memory, emotion, and discovery, a fourth-dimensional unveiling.

"Family" (2024) perhaps best demonstrates Arjuna’s Gesamtkunstwerk, his total integration of poetics, colour theory, figuration, and perspective. Its labyrinthine structure is reminiscent of Escher’s paradoxical architectures, yet interwoven with sfumato transitions and chiaroscuro depth, miniaturised to a Mughal intricacy. The gazes of the figures are deeply evocative of Egyptian hieroglyphs, where even a millimetric shift of the iris imparts pathos, biography, lived experience and interiority.

This is not merely pastiche. It is a meta-iconic language, resonant with Mayan ritual figuration and Aztec ritual-painting abstraction. Their dance is not decorative but ceremonial, perhaps even entelechial, where form reaches its fulfilment. As Bharata Muni’s Nāṭyaśāstra instructs, the nine rasas (sentiments of pleasure) emerge not from subject-matter, but from bhāva, the aesthetic emotion internal to the Gesture.⁵ Arjuna’s figures emanate karuṇā (compassion), vīra (heroism), and śānta (tranquillity) in a dynamic interplay.

In conversation with Arjuna, he shared that "Family" was conceived as a visual prayer, a contemplation of familial impermanence, as his children approach adulthood. The painting is not an illustration of sorrow but a vibrational field of felt temporality. These are chronotopes - Bakhtinian time-spaces - expressed in Mark, hue, and rhythm. The vibrations that encircle the figures are neither ornamental nor abstract; they are the Ritournelles of time, encoded in form. 

Indeed, his work is a unique confluence of spiritual meditative immediacy and Western plastic rationalism. Focusing instead on the aesthetic logic through technical mastery, compositional intelligence, and the embrace of medium-specific truth (media veritas), Arjuna has forged a new language, a visual poetics of breath, gesture, and interiority.