Now Showing at Saskia Fernando Gallery: The Way You Like It by Thisath Thoradeniya

Saskia Fernando Gallery is pleased to present Thisath Thoradeniya’s latest exhibition The Way You Like It, marking the artist’s first solo presentation in a decade. The Way You Like It is an examination of the human condition. Thisath Thoradeniya imagines life as an absurd theatre, inviting viewers to make sense of it while remaining aware of the impossibility of ever escaping it. The exhibition opens into a dialogue on human agency and experience that constantly goes off script amidst uncontrollable social, political, and emotional variables.

Led by an inanimate wooden marionette that plays the secondary role of Victorian jester, Thoradeniya’s series of drawings and kinetic sculptures reveal a careful study in body language and psychology. Imbued with nonchalance, joy and fear they come alive with a range of human emotions.

Existing in a fool’s paradise, the marionette wades through a discomforting reality with mirth. Dancing on the Edge draws on the familiar metaphors of the circus, trapeze performances, and precarious balancing acts to imagine life as a spectacle of uncertainty. Here, the jester is never fully in control, pulled in different directions by forces beyond its grasp, embodying the tensions and absurdities of human existence. With each series, the scene shifts between warmth, suspense, humour, and fear.

Aspirations take centre stage in the series Dreams, Dreams, Dreams. Filled with whimsy, the works construct worlds of make-believe that mirror our deepest desires and imagined futures. Yet beneath their playful surfaces lie the blind spots of dreaming itself. Thoradeniya reflects on the ease with which we abandon these aspirations as they collide with the demands and realities of contemporary life.

The Great Fall gradually moves towards a more sombre register, where playful theatrics give way to the weight of lived experience. The toy-like marionette slowly transforms into a figure marked by resilience and determination, coming to terms with the contradictions of its own human existence.

Within this theatre of life, the protagonist is both subject and observer, predestined to be shaped by its environment while simultaneously questioning the roles we inhabit.

The exhibition The Way You Like It  will be open to the public from 11.06.26 – 11.07.26 at SFG, 138 Galle Road, Colombo 03.

For more information or press inquiries, please contact: [email protected]