Saturday, July 1, 2017

Odile Kinart - My Boats Don't Have Oars

My sculptures are spectators or dancers




I want to express serenity, harmony, and light humor. My sculptures are spectators or dancers who dance the dance of life; they are more like Buddha’s. But in fact I am a workaholic, passionate and restless, longing for calm.



My boats don’t have oars




My figures are all at rest. The attributes are beds, chairs, sofas, baths or swings. My boats don’t have oars. They sail along with the current, in harmony with the elements, with life itself. The names of my sculptures often refer to quiet times: timeless, time lost, time off ... just sitting there ... listening to the summer rain ...




The form is just as important as the content




The same theme will turn into a tear-jerker in one poem and can become quite moving, universal or poetic in another. The difference isn’t in the subject, but in the choice and dosage of both words and breaks. Volumes and form tension are important visual art aspects.



I attach a great deal of importance to traditional aspects

I feel the traditional aspect of art is very important. All the vagueness and pretence surrounding art irritates me. A chair designed in pure lines and carefully built is just as much like art to me, as can be the case with cooking.


Accessible Art


I am particularly inspired by pre-Columbian art and the old African wooden sculptures you can admire in the Tervuren museum. I find ethnic art very appealing, as it’s so simple, almost child-like, but very expressive. The sheer joy which has gone into making these sculptures is very evident. I am also a great admirer of Art Brut, of the works of art produced by psychiatric patients, like the ones on display at the Gent Museum Dr Guislain, and of children’s drawings. I also love allotment gardens, with buxus and taxus pruned into dragons and animals. Yes, I know, we are now on the very edge of kitsch, but this is only a word, just like the ugly words artist and intellectual.



The words love and god are also in the top five of ugly words.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Jorge Marin - The Body as a Landscape


With over 25 years of artistic work, he has successfully entered into Mexico's artistic scene and has become a representative of figurative international sculpture.



Marin’s remarkable career has included over 150 exhibitions in Latin America, North America and Europe.




The sculptures of Jorge Marin reflect in bronze the intrinsic strength and force that emanates from its creation and permits him to construct dynamic bodies, full of movement, which challenge gravity and rotate in space supported on one point.




 There is a constant subject in Jorge Marin’s sculpture, which is the body as an entity containing the spirit, always appearing in the splendor of its physical state. The being is always explained by what contains it, the body.




Today, the body is conceived more as a space than an object in and of itself. It is the scenario of the human struggle as well as its synthesis and its memory. Thus, the human figure narrates humanity’s own becoming, and the body is, after all, simply landscape.




His work also represents the struggle between the coldness of bronze and the diverse emotions that his subject's evocate: the perfect balance of the equilibrists and his winged figures has become his particular seal. While it is true that his series of bodies tends to be based on the triumph of their acrobatic postures, metaphorically these bodies are speaking and surrendering to the temptation of risk and the prophecy of failing and falling down from this dubious paradise in which we live.




Another notable trait in his work is the mask, an attempt to depersonalize his sculptures and become another medium of expression of a body that contains universal symbols in itself.




“My artistic proposition follows my vision and perception of the world, how I interpret it and how I see it. From there, I dealt diverse topics, always related to the people of the 20th and 21st century, that is to say contemporary. It is also possible to say that they are questions of the man of all the times – as the paternity, the game, the balance, the fear, the love, the hatred, etc.”




He currently exhibits "Wings of a City" in Mexico City, which opened in 2010, and another of his exhibits, "The Body as a Landscape", has been shown in museums and galleries throughout Europe since 2011, including Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, Istanbul, Berlin, Brussels Budapest, Timisoara, and will be shown in St Petersburg and Brussels .  His work is currently on permanent exhibition at R E Welch Gallery in Seattle.

R E Welch Fine Art Gallery

Monday, April 1, 2013

Philippe Dutilleul - Poet of Light


That delicate touch of light!
Each painting that Dutilleul undertakes is a new quest. His desire to paint, and always to renew, goes hand-in-hand with the subtle investigation into light and shade.


In the midst of a very successful career with prestigious representation in one of the best galleries in Paris, Dutilleul’s health faltered. He suffered from an illness that robbed him of his sight. For nearly fifteen years he was subjected to fevers and deadly headaches. Fortunately he recovered a few years ago and started painting again. He now feels the illness brought him to where he is today. There is no regret. There is an enhanced love of life. Light is an obsession.
It is these glimpsed effects that he will search for and collect in the area around Uzes, the Cevennes, the Lozere and further afield in Corsica and Andalucia. "Lighting interests me perhaps even more than landscape" he reveals.



His passion is such that, whilst painting, he is already imagining the quest for and discovery of new colors for his next works. Every day he feels both his vision and skill developing. Technically he begins with a luminous, lightweight coat of acrylic paint, next enriching the canvas with delicate strokes of oil paint. This results in an ethereal, heavenlymountain landscapes, using royal blue, violet, at the same time introducing in the shadows – some secret hints of red ochre. The gorge thus illuminated, becomes suddenly sensuous . . .


Originally from the misty north, Dutilleul attended the Decorative Arts School in Toumai, and then the Acadamy of Fine Arts in Douai.  Inspired by paintings of an earlier age, he practiced the delicate craft of restoring paintings for the Museums of Strasbourg.  Hooked on art history, he became intimately acquainted with the Old Masters.  This interest has never left him, for even today, to relax, he makes accomplished copies of an Arcimboldo, a Rembrant or a Vermeer.  His relationship with the latter is very special, in fact it is not unusual for him to follow the Dutchman’s example of using almost photographic soft-focus in the foreground combined with strong keylight.  A colorist, he treasures memories of some key works:  Monet, Matisse, Bonnard or even Bioules.


At the moment of achieving superlative beauty – a perfect footprint in the clay – he makes a sky shine with fire beyond a jagged horizon, giving us moments of pure unforgettable poetry.  From one canvas to the next, Dutilleul makes the great spectacle come alive for us, with a background accompaniment of subtle, sublime music.

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Herve Dubreil - Unusual Perception


Dubreil’s work was recently exhibited at the Vasarely Foundation in Aix-en-Provence in connection with a Picasso retrospective.




We see hesitant figures moving in imaginary spaces, mixing with each other and connecting in a fluid space. Neither abstract or figurative, Dubreil’s work is a world in motion, frozen in colors and texture. Dubreil has matured and modified his pictoral expression over the years and has recently brought into his studio the inspiration of his love of Jazz. A universal harmony emerges from his work. These are works of distinction which never impose on the viewer or even the subject.


He is an artist who makes no concession


No tricks are allowed


Art at its purest

Monday, October 1, 2012

Zivana Gojanovic - Existentialism


The very nature of existence, of experiencing our own existence, is primal.
It goes beyond thought or words.
The recurring theme to Gojanovic’s work is
existentialism, the struggle of the common
man to overcome, or just to understand,
the forces that are larger than himself that
shape his existence.
 

Man is a vessel that
carries his soul if released to the sky the
two become whole. ENERGY. We all walk
a path of many tales and in the end the story
will be told. A window is not to only open
and close, it is to see the beauty around.
Her work is not subject to cultural trends
or current events.


Her themes are
timeless. The very nature of existence, of
experiencing our own existence, is
primal. It goes beyond thought or words.
Her paintings emerge from the
subconscious mind, a place where words
do not exist in and of themselves.


The subconscious constantly keeps its own
record of experience. It is the fertile
ground that germinates our ideas of who
we are and where we are going. This is
where she resides when she paints:
beyond words or trends. The
subconscious is a mystical place, and
its primal propulsion drives us all.

So in her paintings, through repetitive
symbols, strong colors and shapes she
attempts to create an emotional state in
the viewer that allows him to connect to
his own core strengths, transcending the
Sisyphean tasks of daily life and thereby
reaching a state of hope and enlightenment.
Her work has been exhibited in the
United States and Croatia and is in the
private collections of David Copperfield,
Magician/Entertainer and Dr. Laura
Schlessinger, Radio Personality. In 2007
she was commissioned to paint Senator
Hillary Clinton’s portrait.