Shawn Kuruneru

Drawing on the 9th century Chinese “floating perspective” painting philosophy (a kind of multi-perspective precursor to Cubism), Expressionist woodblock prints, and the New York School of Ab-ex, Kuruneru’s newest black-on-raw-canvas works bridge t...

Drawing on the 9th century Chinese “floating perspective” painting philosophy (a kind of multi-perspective precursor to Cubism), Expressionist woodblock prints, and the New York School of Ab-ex, Kuruneru’s newest black-on-raw-canvas works bridge the East-West dichotomy in ways both personal and aesthetic, subtle and literal. The artist (whose Chinese, Sri Lankan, and Canadian heritage is found referenced throughout his body of painted and drawn works) cites, if only obliquely, the above-mentioned schools, as well as Canada’s Group of Seven landscape painters, as artistic cousins. Ultimately, the resulting works ricochet back and forth between the organic and the carpentered, light and dark, floating and grounded. They exist equally as deconstructed landscapes, super-charged yin yang, and futurist jigsaw puzzles. Their diverse cultural and aesthetic origin-points allow the works to resist easy classification and yet they read instantly as the nuanced, intuitive works of an artist both revisionary and visionary.