How many skies have fallen marks the first retrospective of Jagath Weerasinghe in India. Comprising a collection of works from the past thirty years until the present, and organised thematically, the exhibition brings together paintings that are suggestive of Sri Lankan, or more broadly, island histories. The exhibition provokes interpolative approaches for thinking about and responding to land and landscape, historical narrative, the monumental, and human/social bodies. While Weerasinghe’s paintings embrace narratives about the failed states of plurality both in Sri Lanka and elsewhere, they also explore the complex contradictions in which we, as individuals and societies, continue to inhabit.

For this exhibition, Weerasinghe includes selections from various series that reference nation and nationhood—as an island, a former colony, a territory in which landscapes are inextricably linked to the visualizing of history. These include recent monumental works that inscribe bodies into light and landforms; the enigmatic stupa; the conjuring of divine forms and spaces; and how the passage of time is but one method for recovering memory and a sense of empathy. Weerasinghe’s bold compositions prompt one to ask: for whom is painting? And is painting enough to satisfy critical approaches to the cascade of failures which continue to accompany what some call progress?

Having once described Sri Lankan artists as living and working in an era of ‘para-modernism,’one may describe Jagath Weerasinghe’s approaches to painting as both politically nuanced while moving across broader networks of visuality and narrative history. Artist advocate, theorist, and thoughtful recorder of Sri Lanka’s traumatic and unmatched histories, Weerasinghe’s works are poetic evocations, if not political condensations, of the past rendered as ever-present. Such continuities pervade his works that can be intimate in scale yet expand how we see, and of whom. Through energetic cadences of colour and form, brushwork that speaks as much to energy flows as political agency, Weerasinghe’s paintings articulate the maelstrom of meanings that accompany the forging of the multiple nows that each of us inhabit and build.