Colombo Critic.com

There are at most four Sri Lankan artists worthy of the name. One of them is Muhanned Cader. His latest exhibition, Drawingsculpture in red & black, opened last night at the Barefoot Gallery. It is possibly the best thing he has ever done - which is saying a lot - and if you love art you should go and see it. If you think you love art but aren’t really sure how to tell good art from bad, you should definitely go and see it. The way to get inoculated against bad art is to familiarize yourself with the good stuff. Go see.

People who know more about art than I do tell me that Cader’s technical virtuosity immediately sets him apart from his contemporaries. He knows what he is doing with ink and paper, canvas and paint: he sets out to create an effect and he achieves it. If you’re sick of making allowances for the crapness of most things Sri Lankan - the can-openers that don’t open cans, the workers who don’t work, the public servants who don’t serve, the governments that don’t govern - you’ll love Cader’s work, because for once you won’t have to make any allowances. You can trust this guy. Feeling critical? Do your worst. Want to apply the most stringent ‘international’ standards? Please do; you should anyway. The man can take it. The man comes through.

Still, the ability to do whatever he wants in his chosen medium and style is only half of what makes an artist worth the price of his dinner. The other half - most criticis would say the more important half - is what he decides to do with that ability. Here is where Cader really shines. Not for him the pablum sentimentality, the lovebucket slop, the head-up-the-ass highmindedness of his contemporaries - well, that’s a relief for a kickoff. You won’t find him on the pseud level (the Ananda Coomaraswamy level), mealymouthing the Sariputra. In the canteen of the Department of Aesthetic Studies, where the schooled but uninspired float gassy political backstories to hide the ugliness and lack of affect of their daubs, you’ll seek him in vain. Cader is beyond all that: way beyond. If you listen carefully, late at night, you can hear him coughing a hundred floors above them, like - just like - Hank Williams in the Tower of Song.

Where he is - what he gives you - is reality: a clear-eyed take on it that comprehends (in both senses of the word) the whole of life without anger or sentimentality. It is as it is; here it is. The undiscriminating might take it for cynicism, but that’s wrong: a cynic is someone who is for ever convinced it’s going to rain, and Cader is already sopping wet. His work is too emotionally engaging, too supportive of multiple interpretations, to be cynical. Besides, it’s damn funny, which cynicism - pace its reputation among adolescents of all ages - isn’t.

Ah yes, the humour. Maybe I should have mentioned it earlier, because it’s the second thing you notice about Cader’s work (the first being its twisted beauty). People stand in front of his canvases and giggle. Drawingsculpture is one of the funniest collections yet, which is pretty amazing when you consider that the inspiration - evident to anyone who knows the story and has eyes in his head - comes from the turns his life has taken since his last exhibition (at the 2006 Singapore Biennale). To put it in a nutshell: he’s been forced to spend most of that time apart from his wife while she endures a debilitating and seemingly endless treatment for a life-threatening illness. More recently, his father died and he himself suffered a heart attack. Bad stuff. And it’s all there in Drawingsculpture: malformed, metastizing organs, meat under pressure, vital fluids spraying from overstressed conduits, tissue samples returned, flaccid and traumatized, from condemnatory biopsies: all there. And it’s funny.

Go see. This is the good stuff. This is the real stuff.

What more needs to be said? Ah yes: two things.

First, a caveat: I count Muhanned Cader and his wife, Mariah Lookman, among my dearest friends; if you feel this must imply a certain bias, accept my review in that spirit. But I’m an artist too (in this medium) and my friends will tell you - with some resentment - that I don’t make many allowances for friendship

Second, a word to collectors: the works on display are priced almost derisively low. And Muhanned Cader is going places; this is almost certainly the last time you’ll be able to buy an original work of his for under Rs. 50,000. Go see. Go buy. You won’t find a better piece of investment advice with relation to a Sri Lankan asset (of any kind) this year or next.