Seven artists will showcase new works as of this evening at the Art Seen gallery in the capital under the name Painting Notes.
The exhibition, which is curated by Maria Stathi, will feature works from Raymonde Beraud (from Cyprus), Gary Colclough (from the UK), Panayiotis Doukanaris (from Cyprus), Vangelis Gokas (from Greece), Jost Munster (from Georgia), Eleni Phyla and Andreas Savva (both from Cyprus).
The paintings focus on new approaches and perceptions of contemporary painting, while also trying to answer the question of what painting means today.
According to artist and assistant professor at Frederick University, Dr Savvas Christodoulides “the works demonstrate the unparalleled breadth and diversity that the practice of painting guarantees, but also the ability to deal with and respond to both contemporary as well as timeless questions. Exercising practices inherent in the traditional principles of painting and other formalistically exemplary and liberated, using ‘unorthodox’ materials and surfaces, the artists highlight and exploit the inexhaustible nature of the medium of painting.”
Speaking about the exhibition and her creative process, Beraud said “my paintings are developed through a long process of repeated additive and subtractive procedures with oil paint on canvas. Compositional elements coexist with more unconventional devised gestures, retaining aspects of immediacy and accident alongside more constructed painterly passages. The paintings trace a journey that has no mark governing beginning or end – they are a consequence, a record, the image of their own execution.”
While Beraud’s paintings show a journey without a start or end, Colclough will show a certain kind of ordinary order to things in his paintings. But before his paintings become images on canvas, the painter searches through existing photographs of the natural world in order to find “a degree of blankness onto which I can project,” the artist said.
Doukanaris also goes through a continuous process of research to produce his paintings. In his work, he said, the canvas is the conditional carrier of the image and it works as the main means of expression with an emphasis on investigating the materiality. In this way, the image loses it superiority and all means of art take on a broader interpretation.
Gokas will manage to have visitors take a closer look as his paintings are small portraits that are the size of matchboxes. The people in the portraits are those who captured the artist’s gaze or his mind. These may be people who are alive or dead, who are famous or not and who are real or fictional.
The collage-based method that Munster uses imports spliced and repeated components as part of a painting space. Works are often resolved as free standing or hanging structures which frame space as well as capture small incidents of process. His paintings and installations in wood, paint and paper experiment with colour and the painted surface to create a series of works that explore the reaches of representation.
Phyla’s art comes from her fascination with certain objects, situations and even people that magnetise her. “Perhaps because they have some relation to my old clothes, past years, a style, an old interest”, she said. She goes beyond the actual point of attraction in her work, to show the story that goes with the items and situations and narrates them to the viewer.
Savva’s work is always architecturally balanced. He aims to build, as he puts it, closed motifs on the painting surface to distributed patterns in the same way as his large installations. Speaking about this series, he said “the surface of the painting plays a major role as I use a particular technique, which gives a very smooth, velvety surface in order to develop those motifs”.
Painting Notes
Group exhibition. Opens May 4 at 6.30pm until June 22. Art seen, 66B Makarios Avenue, Cronos Court, Nicosia. Monday, Wednesday, Friday: 3.30pm-7pm. Tel: 22-006624
