Tilak: A Voyage in the Modernity of Weaving

Tilak Samarawickrema embodies in his work the contemporary spirit of his country, Sri Lanka. His prodigious output is rooted firmly in the local artisan tradition and spans the gamut from wall-hangings to carpets, passing through an entire spectrum of weavings. His motifs are inspired by the decorative ceremonial clothing and the costumes of Sinhalese dancers. The colours which Tilak uses are vibrant, but never overbearing or harsh. The warmth of his yellows, reds and oranges are always balanced by blacks and grays, by brilliant blues, or by beige and umber. His works are executed by hand by the skilled weavers from Talagune, a remote village in the Kandy district, where age-old traditional techniques of dyeing and weaving cotton are preserved.

An architect by profession, Tilak spent 12 years of his life in Italy. His close friend, Bruno Munari, captures the full import of his creative vision; “Tilak is doing his work in his country, Sri Lanka, seeking the images of his land, the forms, the colours and the traditional composition …. with these elements, he recomposes a new imagery coherent with contemporary sensibility.”

As a result of his Italian training, Tilak’s work is infused with a geometry that ties lessons from Bauhaus to those of constructivism through the experiences of the Lombardian “concretists”. The geometric grid of his textiles becomes a sensitive heddle, the magnetic field which integrates all of that he has borrowed, all of the quotes and references from his culture and life experience, The allusions to architecture are frequent in his tiered compositions or his square mandalas which remind one of the optics games of Albers. Many of his designs are surmounted by triangular roofs which evoke the structures of palaces or the facades of temples with superimposed pediments.

The geometric order which governs the synthesis of Tilak’s forms gives his work a hieratic presence and an inherent stability which teeters on the edge of the decorative and the sacred, the profane and the ceremonial. Tilak’s images harken to a country where prayer takes precedence over spectacle where spirituality is practiced as a ritualistic performance.

The spiritual symbols become the rational elements of Tilak’s aesthetic order. In contrast to the middle ages and the renaissance, contemporary art seeks perfection in the magic of the material. The spirit of the artisans’ tradition thus reappears in the guise of a daily mythology upon which is based the modern ideal of beauty.

Tilak’s forms and colours have their source in an effusive ancestral memory which comes together as the common denominator of his geometric order, and which distinguishes the modernity and rational philosophy of his work. To us, the tapestries which Tilak designs are real, fresh, alive, harmoniously conceived and structured. But they are more than this, because in fact, they integrate our taste for the present with a subtle metamorphosis of meaning.

These pure products of the Sinhalese artisan transcend all borders of time and culture and decorate the walls and floors of our living
environments, enriching the quality of our earthly lives.

This voyage across matter and forms was conceived in the fertile mind, the factory of dreams which belongs to Tilak. A chronicle of Sinhalese history parades in his language of modernity. Tilak has become one of the masters of contemporary textile art without renouncing his roots, but rather, by actualising their specificity.

Tilak is a role model whom I am pleased to salute.

Pierre Restany

(Reproduced from : “Tilak: A voyage in the modernity of weaving” by Pierre Restany. Catalog Deutsches Textilmuseum Krefeld, 1995).

Pierre Restany (1930-2003) was an internationally known French art critic and cultural philosopher. In 1960 he created the idea and coined the term “Nouveau Réalisme”. From 1963 onwards Restany edited the art and architectural magazine Domus. In 1982 he co-founded Domus Academy, the first postgraduate design school in Milan.