About the Event
SILVERLENS is pleased to present The Quality of Sunlight is a Filter Through Which Our Thoughts and Feelings Pass, Catalina Africa’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Previous exhibitions in Silverlens are The Mystery of the Abstract Jogging (2012) and PART 1: Reverse Boomerangs and other exercises for pleasure (warm up/cool down) (2015).
The Quality of Sunlight is a Filter Through Which Our Thoughts and Feelings Pass presents paintings, objects, and video that explore the genre of landscape painting reconfigured into the artist’s unique visual language of patterned abstraction along with a personal narrative of illumination inspired by life near the sea.
Spanning several large paintings depicting the terrain she calls home, Africa reimagines the space of painting into a labyrinth of caverns and enveloping corners, womb-like for their depth and mystery, a complex for exploring artistic consciousness. She states, “Inevitably it is about painting - a continuous refinement of my relationship to it, thus making akin the process of painting to the process of self-discovery.” In staging her presence, the artist signs with a handprint echoing man’s first consciousness inside the cave several millennia ago, a way of performing magic to control destiny. Africa filters the rarefied air of her world with diagrammatic zones of emotional and imaginative power - dream mazes apparently, at certain times aided by the pure spirit of a child, the artist’s daughter, in making these pictures with the weight of authenticity. In another instance, the artist’s whole being seems to dissolve into atomic composition while experiencing the sensuousness of time, lying in the sand, into a state of bliss - a means of “translating emotional states into direct visual experience.” Catalina Africa’s search for the authentic provides a unique style of painting towards ecstatic states of abstraction, followed by a rendition of the world without regard for the ordinary, in visionary fashion, filtering the ephemeral from the infinite.
For inquiries on this show, contact info@silverlensgalleries.com or +63917-587-4011.