One of the most insightful descriptions of Isaac Falconer/Saku Gunasegaram's work is contained in the brochure An Element of Gold for a solo exhibit held at the Palazzo Montefano in Bologna, Italy, September 8 - October 8, 2000.  Curator Ross Lance Mitchell, former gallery director at the Barnes Foundation Museum writes as follows:

Falconer/Gunasegaram is a Tamil woman born in Sri Lanka who immigrated legally with her family to the United States at the age of 18.  Although educated as a psychologist and employed in the United States as a research scientist in the study of breast cancer, she was swept away by her creative passion to paint in Venice.

The story of her coming to Italy is as romantic as it gets.  While taking a rare vacation from her profession in molecular genetic epidemiology, she stayed in Venice for a month and painted.  During her stay in Venice, she met a gallery owner who was impressed by her work.  She was offered a monthly stipend and a place to live for a year.  The Medicis live!  Although she has been a life-long artist, she never took the field seriously as a profession for herself.  Family pressures and a natural talent in the fields of psychology and science led her to success in both fields.  But there was an inner longing for something else, something even more creative.  You are surrounded in this gallery by the manifestation of that amazing journey.

Falconer/Gunasegaram is a deeply spiritual person and her art grows out of her spirituality and her sensitivity.  It also grows out of her feminism, represented by the element of gold symbolically woven into the construction of her art.  Her use of paper as the support for her painting perfectly reflects her weltanschaung.  The sensitivity of paper is quite different from that of canvas.  Paper changes the nature of the paint as it absorbs the pigment but it also is changed by the act of absorption.  As in Eisenberg's Uncertainty Principle where the mere fact of observation affects the results, Falconer/Gunasegaram absorbs her environment and changes it in the process.  She measures the emotional content of those around her as well as her surroundings and her paintings are a litmus test of her findings.  Further, there is a Rorschach ink blot test quality to the backgrounds of many of her pieces.  What we end up with is a body of work that asks a question and then answers it; the background asks and the foreground answers.  Like William Blake, Falconer/Gunasegaram is a visionary artist, one who searches her soul for the light within.

In her use of gold and the exotic nature of her work, we see the influence of her Sri Lankan origins. The pastiche aspect of the paintings bespeaks a post-modern influence as exemplified by the paintings-within-paintings in the work of David Salle. Her use of rectilinear forms superimposed on backgrounds remind one of the push/pull effects of Hanns Hoffmann and his floating rectangles. The effect is also reminiscent of the large floating units of Rothko, but on an intimate scale. Her work has a collage quality similar to Rauschenberg combined with a Paul Klee playfulness. There is also a Byzantine aspect created by the written text incorporated into each piece. The influences are all synthesized by Falconer/Gunasegaram into a unique voice expressing her own interpretations of her life experiences.

This show of nineteen paintings by Falconer/Gunasegaram in Bologna is her first since moving to Italy at the beginning of 2000.  Her growth as a painter is self-evident in the work surrounding you.  Her joie de vivre is also inherent in her artwork.  The playful quality comes through even in works of a darker nature.  The Janus nature of her double-sided pieces reflects her innate scientific perspective; she looks at things from all sides, and once she does, she sees a new world reflected there.  The fish motif running through several of her pieces can be viewed from numerous different perspectives, but who would be so presumptuous as to analyze the psychologist?  However, judging by the success she is achieving in her artwork, it appears that science's loss will be the art world's gain.

"The objects seem to be bathed in the light of memory, yet they're painted with such solidity and real feeling that you can almost touch them.  One might say that art has left nothing to chance."  1960 - From a scene in Fellini's La Dolce Vita discussing a painting by Morandi.