Godwin Constantine’s work takes us to a space engulfed
with acute political and social implications that are connected
with an ethnic conflict and the resultant war that is being fought
for over 20 years in the land of his birth, Jaffna. In his paintings
Constantine has developed a haunting iconography within his visual
language where fleshless sculls peep at every corner making the
foreground, and devastated landscapes forms the backdrop. Here,
his work could find affinity with Kathy Kollwitzs’ numerous
drawings of ‘death’ and Anslem Kiefer’s tortured
landscapes that stretch into infinity. Constantine takes as his
subject matter the ‘existence’ that is challenged
in traumatic circumstances of war. His personal experiences living
in Jaffna as a youth partly forms the strength of his conceptual
intensity. In these art works, the boundaries that demarcate the
personal and political are subsumed into one, leaving no space
for a reality other than the political one.
