In the world of Matthew Krishanu’s paintings, water embodies freedom. For Krishanu, “divinity” is located in “family, babies, children, water, nature.” Discussing his exhibition “The Bough Breaks” the morning after it opened at Camden Art Centre last month, he spoke reverently of “the banyans and the fruit trees” he and his brother climbed as children, and the woods and lakes of Epping Forest on the outskirts of London that he visits with his daughter.
That elemental freedom extends to his handling of paint. The great trees of his “Banyan” series are painted in fluid gestural sweeps that leave thinned earth tones dripping down the canvas to form trailing vines. Elsewhere, the little boys that appear as protagonists in many paintings are pictured blissfully submerged in the velvet waters of a night-lit swimming pool or placid lake. The exhibition counterbalances these visions of liberty with the precisely rendered “Mission” paintings, in which airless ecclesiastical interiors are rammed with compliant, worshipful bodies. In an informal work on paper, a young South Asian boy jabs a bearded character Krishanu describes as “a white Sistine God” in the eye. Take that!
