Exhibition: 9th September – 8th October 2011
Maddox Arts is pleased to present a show of new paintings by Venezuelan artist Emilia Sunyer. For the past thirteen years, Sunyer has worked in complete solitude infusing her artistic practice with a reflective sensibility. In her work depictions of water become vehicles for expressing a range of psychological and emotional states. Sunyer’s monochromatic paintings investigate the contradictions and tensions inherent in nature’s representation. By employing classical metaphors from nature such as waterfall, sea and fire, Sunyer reveals deep personal spiritual longings, expressing the paradoxical, yet symbiotic relation intrinsic to nature.
Sunyer employs an innovative technique, which has been developed by the artist for more than twenty years. By gradually layering acyclic to the canvas, Sunyer manages to build up depth and texture behind the visible surface in a “negative” process to classical painting. In this practice, the brushwork is rendered invisible giving the painting a reflective, synthetic material surface.
Sunyer’s predilection for a minimal colour palette, lack of representational context and monumentality is not as the artist states “an ironic post-modern distancing posture”. The restricted colour choice and monumental scale of her canvases evoke a sense of melancholic reverie, seducing the senses of the viewer and inviting her/him to engage at an emotional level. The spectator is intended to be overwhelmed and drawn into an intimate, self reflective, experience. This experience, reflects how the artist ‘paints from her own sensibility and with faith in painting’.