‘If I am sensitive to what is going on in the world today, I can’t paint pink flowers’
THE FIRST time I set foot in Nicholas Panayi’s studio in Nicosia’s old city, signs of creation were ubiquitous. Canvases hung from the walls, paints, palettes and brushes cluttered corners and fabrics draped doorways. This time, I entered into a bare space with naked walls that seemed uncomfortably empty. With Panayi’s work now at the Rouan Gallery in Limassol, his studio has been temporarily vacated and I would have to use only the artist’s words to imagine his creations.
If it is difficult, verging on the impossible, to describe painting in words, then Panayi is incredibly deceptive. He does not seem daunted by that impossibility and proceeds to speak with great aplomb about the creative process and its products.
The works in Panayi’s current exhibition testify to the artist’s enduring interest in the human figure, its identity and the fragmented world it inhabits. He has also explored the idea and symbolism of light, which may illuminate works from the outside or emanate from within. It is, moreover, the drama of society that has come to permeate the works that Panayi created while listening to the music of Dvorak and the post-war British composer Vaughan Williams. “I want to offer a message of reconciliation,” he says “to the unnatural fragmentation in our world, which has divided not only whole communities but most of the planet and with it produced a lot of intense pain.”
Though painting itself may constitute a highly self-centred act, Panayi does not deny the profound effect of the social and political on his very personal creations. He speaks of a dialect between the two and affirms that ‘“big’ issues influence common people, external events influence our personal life and experience.” Just as Panayi himself cannot bear indifference, his art is similarly intolerant of complacency. “If I am sensitive to what is going on in the world today, I can’t paint pink flowers. I can’t ignore that in me”
The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca once distinguished between the seated artists and the one who stirred restlessly in the streets. Panayi seems to belong to the latter category but this does not mean that his paintings are realist images of the suffering and discord that have come to characterise the contemporary human condition. The purpose of his work is not to shock and anaesthetise but to arouse emotion and awaken sensibility. “Even though I use these so called negative events that are happening,” Panayi says, “I think the message eventually is positive.” The artist locates the positive effect of his art in its provocation. He tells me that his works see negativity and simultaneously seek to transgress it, always imploring their spectator to look inward and upward towards what he calls a lost harmony.
When I ask Panayi to speak of the exhibition as a whole, he immediately gestures to its psychological effects. Upon entering the gallery “immediately you feel as if you are in the earth itself.” He stops himself to clarify this somewhat macabre statement. “It’s not that you’re buried and trying to get out or that you’re dying and going in,” he says. Rather, by applying the colours and textures of the earth to his art, the beholder may feel “like a farmer who ploughs the earth” and plants seeds in the churned soil or like the “archaeologist digging and searching to discover his identity.”
The works that Panayi has created and assembled for this exhibition do not constitute the final products of his creative process but merely one more sturdy step in the path of creative endeavour. And just as there can be no final work, there is rarely one interpretation and one experience.
As our conversation comes to end, Panayi finally alludes to the futility of speaking about a visual art.
“You have to go and see it to really understand what’s happening,” he says. “And when you go and see this exhibition, try and see it as a whole and see what it does it to you. That’s what I advise.”
Nicholas Panayi. An exhibition of paintings. November 10-24. Rouan Gallery, 28 Dodekanisou St., Limassol. Open Mon.-Sat. 10.30am-1pm and 5pm-8pm. Tel: 25-350845.
