Monday 12 July 2010

Opening of Art Exhibition

Opening of Kelly Norman s Art Exhibition “Recent Studio Works” by Dr Nadia Anaxagorou (Director of Cultural Services for the Limassol Municipality) at Rouan Gallery on Friday 23rd October 2009.

Kelly Norman a graduate of University of Portsmouth in Art Design and Media completed a postgraduate diploma in Fine Art at the Cyprus College of Art at Lemba she now lives and works in Limassol.

To me, the perception and analysis of the light of Cyprus by Kelly and indeed by many foreign artists who work in Cyprus, is particulary interesting revealing a different dimention of both urban and rural environment, owing to a totally fresh and unhibited observation.

Thus the delineation of Lemesos vistas by Kelly possesses that penetrative,explorative perspective of form and colour that goes far beyond an abstract expressionistic rendition into a psychography of well-known, still alien,parts of the city such as the GSO and Enaerios areas in the seafront, or the Ayia Napa neighbourhood, with the towerblocks that have taken the place of green fields,gardens and traditional houses.

Through a rigorous, textured colour, produced by multiple washes of green, her favourite colour and the most natural one in the world, Kelly builds monochromatic transcendental architectural images of Lemesos, using encaustic on oils, with thick layers of wax and scratches allover the canvas to represent the deep wounds inflicted on the city by decaying structures and facades of buildings and a sky on their roof-tops full of satellite cables arials and water tanks.

That state of ugliness and neglect of decaying, often dilapidated blocks and that feeling of unrest and anxiety they evoke,is washed away by a paint of sap green, an organic colour that diffuses calmness, serenity and contemplation throughout, bringing about a cathartic yellow-ochreish radiation of hope and optimism in the city.

A second series of studies features watermelons, symbolic of the cruel summer heat in Cyprus and alluding in their red, purple and green translucency to decomposed bodies, physical or architectural, since the prison wall erected by the seaside constructions, blocks the invigorating breeze and causes suffocation.

Congratulations to Kelly for a very unusual, idiosyncratic, organic, expressionistic symbolism.