Silks Gallery will be hosting the Cypriot artist Elena Kouma and her latest artworks entitled “Heliogony2”, where it develops along parallel structures and formalist parameters, and it explores equivalent concepts, as well as states of materiality and spirituality. At the same time, however, it proceeds further and is differentiated in some aspects from her earlier creation.
In the present paintings, the ecstatic golden yellow dominates. In some pictures seeds of wheat emerge from the soil, toward the light energy, fecundation and abundance. In others, orgiastic efflorescence and fruit bearing occupy the painterly surface, thanks to the life-giving energy of the sun, which eventually leads to the sublimation and the spiritualization of the material world.
Some technical and formal elements in Kouma’s present works, (re)explore certain issues on the “nature” of representation in art, as well as on the artworks as a “framework” or a surface fro viewing. In similar fashion to her previous group of works, in the present artworks she has used pencils for the main outline, while the largest part of the picture is produced with countless, small brushstrokes(in acrylic), the result of a delicate, painstaking and time-consuming process. The latter renegotiated subversively the Renaissance and post-Renaissance approach to the two-dimensional image as a “window to” or as a “mirror of” the world. This compositional and thematic element, while it does not seriously obstruct the viewing of the picture, it nevertheless keeps the viewer conscious of the optical perception of the artwork, thus not letting him or her fully abandon one’s self to the illusionistic nature of representation.
The “opening”-“screen” alternation, in some works is encountered in the form of the circle, thus summing up, one might say the concerns and aims of the artist, as well as the notion with which she has imbued her pictures: the very act of viewing and of the perception of art; the reference to an in-out duality; the schematic-symbolic rendering of the seed as the source of life, and of the sun as the source of energy. Finally, it constitutes the focal point for the consummation of creation, where ecstasy is reached as the climax of exaltation, and where matter is sublimated and spiritualized – a process which, for Kouma, is at the epicenter of art.
The opening of the exhibition will take place on the Friday the 11th of December 2009 at 19:30 with reception and cocktails. The exhibition will be opened by the honorable mayor of Yermasoyia Mr. Andreas Gavrielides. Duration: until the 11th of January 2010.
For further information please contact:
‘Silks Gallery’:
Address: 3 Georgiou A’ Str., Hallmark Complex, Pot. Yermasoyias, 4047, Limassol – CY
Tel: + (357) 25 323 220
Fax: + (357) 25 323 033
Email: info@silksgallery.com
Web: www.SILKSGALLERY.com
