A Sculpture, an Assemblage, a Performance Piece? Buil de Onplezierig admires the artwork, “The chair stands, shoreless and infinite in an anonymous space, waiting – waiting like the elephant Heiyantuduwa Raja to carry the Relic of the tooth of the Buddha? Public and critical reception to this Assemblage is mixed, divided between admiration for the mise en scène and incomprehension as to its significance. This composition contains nothing overtly surrealistic, yet the unnatural clarity of the detail replete with dream visions is hallucinatory in effect. Fearfully and wonderfully made, precious and unique, do we miss the truth and are we brave enough to ask the obvious question? Well, what is it? An outlay of skill and imagination, an object inhabited by an artist’s aura? Is it where language is not sufficient, something new made known, individualism, originality? Pieter Brueghel drew a whale and inside there were hundreds of smaller fish. We see a chair but inside there are hundreds of ideas, assumptions, decisions. Does the chair represent a dialectical tension between the personal and the public?”
