Dhama Thanigasapapathy

At face value, the makeup of Dhama Thanigasapapathy’s paintings, namely vast sprawling landscapes and the absence of people, could be seen to continue a long tradition of landscape painting. At stake, however, is not a benign depiction of rural England but something rather more pressing. Thanigasapapathy, a recent Freelands Foundation Painting Prize winner, combines an interest in sci-fi with a previous career in IT consultancy involving AI analytics to make haunting, pressing paintings. These are paintings one can’t help but see in relation to the ever-worsening climate emergency. They are paintings that one is urged to see in relation to government policy, both national and international. As images, they hold enough familiarity to recall sites and places that we’ve likely visited, been to on holiday, or maybe seen in nature documentaries. Yet the colours are awry. Reds and yellows hold the centre ground as water morphs into fiery lava and the skies, full of heat, verge on collapse. A quiet ecology drives Thanigasapapathy’s paintings, asking us to rethink the familiar, the speed of climate breakdown, and perhaps, just perhaps, art’s role in shaping opinion moving forward.