ART H A B E N S C o n t e m p o r a r y A r t R e v i e w RAY PISCOPO AGNES DURBET-GIONO NANCY CALEF MARIA BORDEANU MELPOMENI GAGANELI CHITRA RAMANATHAN ANNA TERESHINA SOUMISHA DAUTHEL MARTYNA MATUSIAK ART
I am interested in motion, movement, colour, vibrancy and order. In life I express myself by creating order and rationality in my world. Having studied engineering, the discipline that it has imparted has moulded my outlook on life in a linear and regimented structure. My experience has been therefore a series of events in pigeon holes or compartments, so I endeavour to break established rules and boundaries in my work by being non-conformist. Malta C o n t e m p o r a r y A r t R e v i e w Anna describes her artistic style as an intuitive abstract painting, based on her visual experience, gathered together from every day life, travel impressions, her knowledge about composition and color combining. Her main source of inspiration is a natural world, as well as the process of human eye's perception of colors in different light situations. Anna's work combines different mediums and techniques, she works mostly on canvas and paper, using acrylics, watercolor. Anna Tereshina Russia / Switzerland Concepts of fear and control appear in every aspect of life as ordinary events or dull everyday actions. My work addresses seemingly contradictory positions and where emotional extremes meet in the mundane middle. Matching the polarities of safety/danger and comfort/misery, questions their stark opposition.I work in diverse media. I combine print based work with drawings and image transfer. Martyna Matusiak USA USA For many decades I’ve been creating “Peoplescapes,” oil, sculptured characters and applied objects on canvas,addressing cultural, political and spiritual issues facing society. Everyday, I take the brush to canvas and, although I am confronted with fear and insecurity, I also tap into a limitless source of imagery. In those moments, time falls away and it seems that the work creates itself. France Sensing the presence while creating in a world haunted by masculinity and virility and after taking pictures of sewages treatment plants, water filtrations system, factories, she overimposes their silhouettes. Using two contrasting images to question the overrated perception of what society see as beautiful and ugly, the artist aims to balance feminine and masculinity, writing the love letter in every picture. I use all mediums to translate a feeling and vision. My work for the past 10 years displays a strong preference for realistic images that range from fashion and film to artificial landscapes and painted interiors. It all began with several paintings inspired by neoclassical artists, which I reinterpreted as fragments with the help of digital processing. Recent works are inspired by personal photographs that help me construct a story, always considering the painted result while I document a scene. Romania Agnes Durbet-Giono Nancy Calef Maria Bordeanu Ray Piscopo ART H A B E N S
Melpomeni Gaganeli 56 112 86 142 226 4 38 In this issue Special thanks to: Charlotte Seeges, Martin Gantman, Krzysztof Kaczmar, Tracey Snelling, Nicolas Vionnet, Genevieve Favre Petroff, Christopher Marsh, Adam Popli, Marilyn Wylder, Marya Vyrra, Gemma Pepper, Maria Osuna, Hannah Hiaseen and Scarlett Bowman, Yelena York Tonoyan, Edgar Askelovic, Kelsey Sheaffer and Robert Gschwantner. On the cover: Chitra Ramanathan Nancy Calef Martyna Matusiak Soumisha Dauthel Ray Piscopo Maria Bordeanu Agnes Durbet-Giono Anna Tereshina My videos is usually associated with the contemporary self and the digital personality through its socialpolitical reaction at today’s precarious and polarized era. I am trying to observe not only my various bizarre selfs. Technology can easily create multi faced, anxious and problematic identities. I am especially focused in this fact, as a distinctive and powerful shift in global culture and in contemporary’s integral ‘native’ circumstance of everyday life. Melpomeni Gaganeli Greece 166 202 I am a woman painter who lives in Paris and have been painting since the nineties. For a long time I approached my work as a researcher conducting experiments. And finally, I feel like saying that painting is first about moments of life, and moments of my life. Through a conceptual approach, I highlight in a formal way moments of painting (cutouts taken from my own paintings) applied on a flat surface. Soumisha Dauthel France To visually portray happiness, I regularly employ intense colors that incorporate a variety of texture materials that are combined with the paint to create effects that extend beyond their two-dimensional surfaces. Painted with rapid brush strokes in an intuitive manner, my paintings are typically large in scale as I intend for the imagery to imagine continuity that dissipates at the edge of the canvases that have the painting continued on their sides. Chitra Ramanathan India / USA
Special Issue 4042 It’s Not What You think It Is 80cm x 90cm oils on canvas
2 Special Issue Ray Piscopo ART Habens video, 2013 054
ART Habens Ray Piscopo Special Issue Man at Versailles 100cm x 70cm acrylics on canvas 403
Ray Piscopo Hello Ray and welcome to ART Habens. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. Along with your studies and your profession as an engineer, you always nurtured your passion in Art with lots of master class session by renowned master in Europe: how did these formative experiences influence your evolution as an artist? In particular, how does your cultural substratum due to your career as an engineer direct the trajectory of your current artistic research? Hello and thank you for this opportunity to be featured in your illustrious ART Habens. My first impulses in art take me back to the early 1970s when at secondary school I was taught by none other than one of Malta’s leading painters Antoine Camilleri. For a number of years I continued sketching and painting in water-colours and although I had studied various techniques under Maltese artists Anton Calleja (life classes/human form for 3 years), with ceramist George Muscat and with the Italian mosaicist Luciana Notturni of Ravenna, my talents have been largely self-nurtured through trial-and -error. I found it necessary to supplement my knowledge by attending master classes in Salzburg (Hallein) with Hubert Scheibl and in Venice with Amadou Sow /Sergej Klinkov in 2019 and 2010 respectively. Before I attended the classes with master artist Hubert Scheibl I was already using the scraping technique on my canvasses and when I attended his classes I felt very much at home and considered it a great advantage and honour for me being directed by this master.The following year with Senegalese master artist Sou (passed away in 407 Special Issue An interview by , curator and curator 2015) and Klinkov, I started to include motifs, symbols and cartouches in my works of the time. I started the engineering course in 1973, graduating in 1976, yet I still continued painting during the course and all through my engineering career till changeover to being a full-time artist about 8 years ago. As I had stated in my artist’s statement, in life I express myself by creating order and rationality in my world. Engineering is a discipline that has to a greater extent moulded my outlook on life in a linear and regimented
Special Issue 24083 structure, like putting everything in compartments. Abhorring the rigidity it imparted to my art, I endeavoured to break established rules and boundaries by being non-conformist as I was convinced that total adherence to entrenched ideas only creates clinical art. I believe that there is enough proof that art and science, as much as science and religion, can inhabit within the same cocoon of involvement. I am here reminded of the words by the famed French academician André ART Habens Ray Piscopo In the Pits 60cm x 100cm oils on canvas
24091 Special Issue Frossard who stated that the more one progresses in the exploration of the physical world (scientific investigation) the more the mystery (hence philosophical interpretation which ultimately leads to religious awareness) increases. Few are predisposed to serve both fields of activity. We have appreciated the way the results of your artistic inquiry reflects the balanced connection between beauty and truth: we would like to invite our readers to visit http://www.raypiscopo.com in order to get a wide idea about your artistic production: when walking our readers through your usual setup and process, we would like to ask you if you think that there is a central idea that connects all of your work as an artist. My works are bold excursions into the unknown. I can perhaps define my artistic journey as being eschatological in nature, where one undergoes a myriad of experiences in life only to come out stronger and more pure leading to the divine. Life consists of many deaths, and with each death there is a rebirth. Humanity goes through this never ending cycle and I try to celebrate life with each painting I do. It is therefore no secret that humanity and the related qualities of the human being (love, compassion, beauty, fragility, benevolence, etc.) are the central theme around which my art rotates. Art is the human soul, its spirit, its vision, its concept. It is like looking from the Labyrinth out, I see a bright white....like when one sees the light at the end of the tunnel. My life experiences have made me bold and daring. In all this I may be perceived to be someone craving to transcend the outer layer of things. Every image I am presenting, whichever its specific subject, assumes the character of that object. A person resembles an object, and an object evokes a photograph. Being creative and morally oriented, I depart from the observation of a common ‘average object’, and go on delving into it until I reach the level beyond which there is nothing, or at least there is presumably no alternative entrance leading to it. Here is the key theme, and through it each painting that seems to be ‘locked’ can be opened. My works are not faithful depictions of the outer world of objects. They are no reproduction of visual Ray Piscopo ART Habens
ART Habens Ray Piscopo Special Issue 24103 experience. They somehow look like X-Rays, the ultimate layer underneath the skin, the subtle document of a condition meant to be the final one, the edge, the impenetrable wall beyond which the traveller finds himself at the cross roads, the all or nothingness. In other words I seek to penetrate the outer shell, hopefully to discover meaningfulness.. The body of works that we have selected for this special edition of ART Habens and that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article, has at once captured our attention for the way you sapiently deconstruct the artworks of the old masters in order to create such a captivating personal aesthetics: how do you consider the relationship between the heritage from Tradition and contemporary sensitiveness? My infatuation with great works of master artists, whatever the time period and, which at best remain unappreciated and only classified as priceless or taboo, compels and impels me to translate and interpret them through my present feeling onto an empty canvas. I project the masters in a modern idiom demonstarting that their art will live forever and relived through my interpretation for all time. The deconstruction and reconstruction takes place in stages. I look deeper, finding or creating nuances to what there is and create a visible effect that make them stand out as if going out into the 3rd dimension. The contrast I create may be subtle or forceful in quality depending on my mood. This frees me from the straightjacket of dogma or infallible creeds. The underlying meaning and settings are however retained allowing the painting to live on for years to come. This is perhaps how other artists like Picasso (Las Meninas, Women of Algiers..) , Yan Pei Ming (Pope Innocent , Marat, Pape Franco..) -both favourites of mine- and others ‘see’ the masters too.
ART Habens 24111 Special Issue Ray Piscopo Ray Piscopo No Holds Barred 90cm x 780cm acrylics on canvas
The fall of Icarus 100cm x 160cm oils on canvas
Breaking Free 90cm x 70cm acrylics on canvas
15241 Special Issue They create works after the masters as they are personally touched by them. Your colors are often bold and saturated, however, we have appreciated the vibrancy of thoughtful nuances of your canvas, and we like the way It's Not What You Think It Is and Versailles show that vivacious tones are not strictly indespensable to create tension and dynamics. How did you come about settling on your color palette? And how does your own psychological make-up determine the nuances of tones that you decide to include in an artwork and in particular, how do you develop a texture? Perhaps I should first start to explain my ‘philosopy’ when I create art. I like to use the word create, as distinct from ‘to do’, as for all intents and purposes I am giving substance to something residing in my mind and heart. And much like the Creator, after I complete a painting, I sit in front of the completed painting looking at it for hours, listening to music and sipping wine, till I am completely satisfied that the creation was good. Only then I will sign the painting and say ‘a new life is born’. If one is familiar with my paintings one may see ample white and black patches of colour dispersed around the canvas, supplemented around by all the other colours. For me the white and the black represent the extremes in life: birth and death, light and darkness, good and bad, health and sickness, joy and sadness and so on. But in between, all the other life situations take on different colours depending what is actually happening. That is my main palette. In retrospect I believe this is something deriving automatically from my first paintings, being in bi-chromatic colours, predominantly red and black. Here the contrast created the tension. When Picasso was reborn with his Demoiselles D’Avignon giving rise to a new genre of paintings, I feel (now as I am answering this question) that I was reborn 9 years ago when I re-interpreted Caravaggio’s Creation (Adam and God). For me it was a point of no return. The tones were subdued and not as saturated but then I became bold in consonance with my character facing adversity and my palette exploded in full colour. In a way the colours spoke up for me, more than my voice could deliver. I lost my voice in 2001 and I found that art was my best medium for communicating. I try to use hues around the primaries but then I create contrast by placing complimentaries to make them pronounced. To create textures I use different techniques depending oin whether I am using acrylics or oils. With acrylics I use a variety of methods including sputtering and stippling. I also interplay with the placing of colour patches in a random manner. With oils I cannot use sputtering so i have to gradate the layers. The subdued palette in my painting It's Not What You Think It Is is explainable because it was painted during the period I was working on the ‘social issues’ project, and at the time my spirit was likewise subdued. The project was affecting my usually bubbly disposition and this painting was the last I created in the series. In the painting The Man at Versailles the applied colours were chosen to fit the setting of the subject. I have used simlar colours when I painted sculptures (for example Gangesdetail from the Fontana dei 4 Fiumi fountain at Piazza Navona). As you have remarked in your artist's statement, each brush stroke has meaning and purpose and we really like the way your paintings walk the viewers to such excursions into the unknown: into an hybrid dimension where the relationship between the real and the perceived is continuosly challenged, providing the spectatorship with a multilayered visual experience and challenging their perceptual parameters: how important is for you to invite the Ray Piscopo ART Habens
Exhibits at The Old Mill, Lija, Malta - 2019
Special Issue 24183 viewers to elaborate personal meaning? And in particular, how open would you like your works to be understood? It is extremely important for me that the viewer engages with my paintings because it is there that he can find ‘me’. Although my works are realistic, they are not always faithful depictions of the outer world of objects. Beneath the outer surface layer and beyond the appearance of figures and forms of diverse nature, human and non-human, there is always me in search of something. I want the viewer seeing the forms to interrogate them much as I do in terms of their ‘why’ and ‘what for’. In this confrontation with my paintings one can perhaps detect the inner conflicts which I meet with in this Labyrinth. I feel the need to visually document my inner experiences. That is why I invite viewers to dig deep beneath the surface, and view my art work directed towards a layer transcending whatever is visual. I want the viewer to share through my art the process of searching and finding, of dying and then being born again. For me art demands moral justification, and is not in any way an end in itself. My art disproves the idea of art pour l’art. The purpose of art is not art, but the discovery of meaning, ultimate, final, obtained through the depiction of objects with a ‘pen’ which records and interprets. Rich of metaphorical aspects, the contrast of tones that we can recognize in My Thinker and in My New Sneakers reflects the extremes one finds in life: how important is for you to create allegorical artworks? And how do you consider the role of symbolically charged images playing within your work? Creating allegorical artworks is one way to communicate ideas, thoughts, situations that better be left for others to interpret. Sometimes the intended message is understood better through allegories than having to be explicit about what you wish to convey.The effect could even be more interesting if one detects the alternative narrative of the image. My Thinker, after Rodin, is a powerful image which evokes an intense and overpowering disposition both in terms of tones used and the viewing angle of the darkish image with big strong hands. When I look at this painting, I am awed by depth of power it transmits. My New Sneakers, is still symbolically charged by depicting a girl from an Eastern culture robed in her traditional dress and being captivated by new sneakers given to her. One can immediately see the visual contrast but more than anything else, I see a rich culture (symbolised by the eastern robe) tainted by something alien to the culture in the form of a mismatched shoe. Extending the thought further one can apply the message of cultures losing their identity to contemporary influences and intrusions with the excuse of wanting to be cosmopiltan or inter-cultural. Allegories are best used to convey a deeper moral or spiritual meaning without the need to be explicit. My painting Breaking Free also falls into this category and portrays the release from inhibitions that has captivated and perhaps oppressed the subject. One can paint hundreds of images to convey the same intent but an extended metaphor can do just as well if not better as it engages the mind in the process. Your artworks are carefully composed and you often merge surrealistic patterns with human figures, to create such a coherent combination between intuition and rigorous aesthetics: do you conceive you works instinctively or do you methodically elaborate your pieces? In particular, how importance does spontaneity play in your workflow? ART Habens Ray Piscopo
24191 Special Issue Ray Piscopo ART Habens The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus 100cm x 90cm acrylics on canvas
Special Issue 2403 ART Habens Ray Piscopo Il Lupo di Gubbio 100cm x 90cm acrylics on canvas
24211 Special Issue Planning is very important to me. As with life, one plans ahead one way but then one has to react to new ‘inspiring arrows’ along the way of developing the art piece. I define my art as abstracted realism with expressionistic executions. I am not the right person to assign labels to my art and I leave the experts to that but this is how I interpret my style of work. I love human forms and these are central to most of my art works. But then the human undergoes through life’s many and varied experiences and this makes life interesting in so many ways. I try to bring in elements from other time periods in my works and try to create movement and tension as if extraneous elements are engaging with the person, leading to various outcomes. Qualifying my comments to my mainstream genre of paintings, all spontaniety is embedded in the process, as it may come in the form of shapes and visual elements or it may come about through the application of colours or brushstrokes. Experience in painting and the developing aesthetic guide me to place a mark in a particular place and not in another place. It is a coherent process all along but I allow freedom to take over and insert whatever I feel necessary to make the outcome ‘whole’. Spontaniety is only allowed as long as the painting is coming though the way I want it to. I do not like leaving things to chance, even though risk taking has its own rewards. That is how intuition and rigorous aesthetics work with me. It is unlike Gutai where a mere impulse makes you place a mark on the medium. My actions are perhaps more calculated even though I am quite able to paint spontaneously (Gutai 1, Gutai 2 and others), with explosive gestures or uncontrolled movements of the brush. I think of myself as being a versatile and prolific artist and I guess that the type of art pieces I create depend on my mood at the time. Your artistic production also grapples with the most prescient social issues of our unstable contemporary age, including topics belonging to personal sphere as domestic violence, inhibition, child labour, mental health, homelessness, as well as political themes as oppression, wars and conflicts and migration. Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once remarked that "artists's role differs depending on which part of the world they’re in. It depends on the political system they are living under": does your artistic research respond to a particular cultural moment? How do you consider the role of artists to tackle sensitive cultural and religious issues in order to trigger social change in our globalised contemporary age? I consider myself to be a somewhat sensitive person and alert to everything that goes on around me. It may be because I have been close to three personal near death experiences that make me instinctively trigger into action as soon as I sense something is not going right. It may also be because I was thought to love others as I love myself. The vast pyroclastic wave in the use of social media around the globe has been largely beneficial to reveal such issues of what I term ‘institutionalised poverty’: being the deprivation of something which lowers the quality of life of a person or animal or even the forceful loss of the proper mental faculties which by right we should all enjoy. We have to understand the root cause of the problems and we should avoid applying labels to the people who find themselves in pitiful and inhuman conditions that in civilised countries are anathema to the economical progress the country boasts about. Nobody however realises that human conditions may be the results of decisions taken by people in power or as a result of the economic world order. The artist is in the privileged position, should he choose so, to use his works to deliver the right message to make the public aware of worrying social issues and force a change for the better. Speaking Ray Piscopo ART Habens
Special Issue 2423 for my country Malta, where government passed a law allowing artists to vilify religion with impunity for the sake of art and free speech from censorship, is in my opinion sending a wrong message to the population. It seems that nowadays people are no longer sensitive to one ART Habens Ray Piscopo Narcisse 90cm x 90cm oils on canvas
24231 Special Issue another. That is why I want to paint hope, love and positivity rather than shock people to send them seek the light elsewhere. It is opportune here to highlight the intent of my painting Follow the Light. It is a painting sending out the message that despite the ailments of this contemporary age, Ray Piscopo ART Habens Mind Bank 100cm x 100cm acrylics on canvas
Special Issue 2443 ART Habens Ray Piscopo Free as a Bird 90cm x 80cm acrylics on canvas
24251 Special Issue Ray Piscopo ART Habens Follow the light 90 x 100cm acrylics on canvas
Special Issue there is a light by which people can be guided to attain their freedom. Artists should be sensitive to the local environment and to the global scene. Their actions, through their works, should be conducive to make a solid and loud statement for what they stand for, irrespective of the ensuing flak or the lack of support one gets from state entities just because one stands for a particular cause. To conclude I can say that last year I took on personally a specific project to create a series of paintings on social issues, exactly on the issues you mentioned in your question. I wanted to raise awareness on the victims of abuse but at the same time it was aimed to keep in check people in power and people who influenced power with money. I had to abandon the project after doing 12 paintings as it got into me and took away all the lovely colours in my life. My outlook to life being positive orientated was in conflict with the artistic deviation I took. I exhibited the paintings last November and it made me feel very satisfied that the message went out far and wide and I had exceptional national coverage. Your artworks have often explanatory titles, as Narcisse, that allow you to clarify the message while maintaining the element of ambiguity: how do you go about naming your work ? In particular, is important for you to tell something that might walk the viewers through their visual experience? Giving titles to artworks is part of the creative process and mey even add value to the painting. It is not a simple identifier by which one can refer to a particular painting or to list it in a database. On the other hand I try to avoid titling the obvious, unless it is otherwise intended to be that way. More often than not when thinking about the concept or subject of the work to be painted, Iwould have already formed a notion of how I wanted the painting to be titled. In the case of Narcisse I was thinking about Caravaggio’s Narcissus and in my mind the contemporary equivalent of looking one’s self in the mirror or as a reflected image in water was the contemporary perennial ritual of phographing one’s self on a smart phone. People may not immediately realise that the painting actually portrayed this aspect of narcisism perhaps thinking the artist painting a lady taking a selfie. So in this case the title is used as a vehicle to direct attention at the concept behind the painting, or in my jargon looking for substrates below the surface layer of paint. Having assigned the title It's Not What You Think It Is for an abstracted figurative work, I wanted perhaps to tell the viewer ‘ you are at liberty to think what my painting may transmit to you, but it is not what you think it is’. I had many people coming up to me with their own interpretation of the work and wanted me to confirm their evaluation of the forms and it was really exciting engaging with people in that manner, exchanging views as if something was there on canvas, but not there entirely. Other titles are more direct because I cannot assign another title especially if it is after a master. If I may be allowed to add another example of how I assign titles, I choose to mention On the 7th Day which is the title I gave to a painting depicting three Tritons sitting on the ground in front of the Gate to our capital city Valletta. At the time I painted it, a landmark fountain located at the entrance of Valletta had just undergone extensive resoration works after being damaged by misuse and neglect, rendering it back to its former glory. The Tritons Fountain consists of three bronze tritons holding up a huge basin inside a magnificent travertine marble outer basin with jets of water giving life to the modernist sculpture by Maltese artists Wilfred Apap and Victor Anastasi. In my allegorical painting I was intimating that the three bronze figures somehow also needed to rest after 2483 ART Habens Ray Piscopo
Ray Piscopo ART Habens 24311 Special Issue My Thinker 90cm x 70cm acrylics on canvas
Summer 2015 Special Issue Odalisque 90cm x 70cm acrylics on canvas 2413
24331 Special Issue holding the basin since 1959 and that the restoration works were in sore need and due long ago. We have particularly appreciated the way your artwork reflects the synergy between Art and Science: as an engineer by profession, how do you see the relationship between creativity and scientific approach in our media driven contemporary age? And how does your artistic production reflect your scientific background? To answer your question about the relationship between creativity and scientific approach, I contend that inquiriy is at the heart of both of these methods but I believe that the performing and visual (video/films) arts sector stand to gain more than the visual artist producing paintings. However for 3D and art installation pieces there are enough examples to show how scientific approaches and creativity worked together to rope in involvment with the public achieving more interest and interaction. A science based approach involves three main stages: first there must be a primary thought or idea, then a hypothesis is formulated and tested, the outcomes of which are noted, and then finally the results determine which next step should be undertaken. The creative process is somehat similar. For 2D and perhaps even some 3D works, all the artist has to do is to realise the primary idea into a work on canvas or in clay/stone, perhapds going back to it in stages to improve the final output image/sculpture. With an installation involving technology this would still need the same process until the idea is put into a working model or a physical entity. With performing arts, the artistic production may be honed to be more acceptable to the project developer and eventually to meet the acceptance of the public. With 2D work the final production cannot be change to suit. Some of my 2D artistic productions include certain elements from the physical engineering world that in a way reflect my technical background, but the way I had deconstructed and abstracted them make interesting viewing (MindBank, No Holds Barred, Being Eccentric). I hope that in the near future this background will come to better use when the opportunity will finally present itself to realise artistic projects on technology-based installation pieces, getting the max synergy between Art and Science. Your work is held in many private collections in Malta, Italy, Ireland, England, France, Norway, Australia and United States of America and over the years you have successfully exhibited in a number of solo and group shows, both in Malta and abroad, including your recent show at The Old Mill- Lija in conjunction with the Citrus Festival and your upcoming exhibition at the Eden Cinema Foyer: as an artist and curator, how do you consider the nature of your relationship with your audience? And what do you hope your audience take away from your artworks? I am all the more happy when people interested in my paintings or in art in general approach me to discuss the various aspects of my works. It is a golden opportunity at the human level for interaction and engagement. It makes my efforts at creating art more satisfying and complete. Unless circumstances compel me otherwise I would always want to accompany my paintings wherever they are on show. I especially missed going to the New York Art Expo where I exhibited two paintings (The Rape of the Daughter of Leucippus and Faticida 2), as New York is another platform which is different from Europe. The interest in the paintings was enormous and the personal contact would have been a new experience for me. Interaction with the viewer is also another piece in the jigsaw of art making and I am very keen to engage. More than wanting to hear that my works are admired, or being liked on the social media, I Ray Piscopo ART Habens
Exhibits from the exhibition ‘Abstract Rhythms in Nature’, St. Julians, Malta - 2016
strive to get a one to one reaction because it is through personal contact that I can understand how my painting clicked or otherwise with the person. Since I opened my personal art gallery close to my studio (in Malta), I feel that this is the most exhilarating experience for an artist to engage in. Meeting viewers and explaining to them my outlook to art, my background and the paintings I have creating is an ensemble that people like and appreciate. It is more value adding and helps them to make an informed choice should they want to acquire paintings. That is why whenever I have online requests for art acqusitions I always invariably insist they come and see the painting in person before deciding to acquire there and then. Acquiring art is a personal experience and I have seen too many happy faces leaving my gallery. As you rightly mentioned, I had rendered a free service as a curator responsible for setting up exhibitions over a 24-month period in one of Malta’s leading hotel. In parallel with my painting schedule I called up emerging and established artists (paintings, sculptures, photography and ceramics) to exhibit freely for a month. I managed to fit in schedules for 25 artists over the mentioned period and the outcome was awesome. In this case the ‘audience’ were fellow artists and I was facilitating their art to be apprciated by others. We have appreciated the originality of your artistic research and before leaving this stimulating conversation we would like to thank you for chatting with us and for sharing your thoughts, Ray. What projects are you currently working on, and what are some of the ideas that you hope to explore in the future? I appreciate your professionalism and dedication to up the standards in your publication and for giving me the opportunity to interact with a formidable team like you have at ART Habens. My oeuvre actually consists of various artistic productions and if I can summarise, apart from the mainstream portfolio of large format paintings I create (some of them portrayed in this publication) and which I intend to keep on doing, I also cater for commissions (mostly figurative in nature, plus local and foreign landscapes including architecture). Since I had learned technical drawing I consider myself accomplished in detailing buildings and structures as can be seen from my various works, all of them having been acquired entirely. I also produce a series that I coined “Credit Card Collection’ being abstract works using a credit card / brush/ broom and a swiping technique. Then for the past two years I have delved into urban mail art being an extention of my incessant sketching effort. To clarify about this body of work, imagine street art works by Banksy drawn on a 23cm x 16cm envelope, only the designs are made by me. I have even designed my own postage stamps and franking dater which I then ‘post’ to myself for my collection. This year I plan to exhibit my recent works in Italy and hopefully am looking at other foreign venues. At present all efforts are being undertaken solely by me and it weighs me down to a certain extent as I want to continue painting as much as I could. Having said this my dream is to use technology in creating art installations. Without giving away too much, I already have developed projects I wish to do but which need the efforts of computer programmers, video specialists and other specialists. Funds are needed to execute even modest installations let alone larger ones. Without such funding, everything must remain on the drawing board but I believe in my karma and is hoping that great things are yet to come. An interview by , curator and curator ART Habens Ray Piscopo Special Issue 24363
24201 Special Issue Ray Piscopo ART Habens My New Sneakers 90cm x 60cm acrylics on canvas
Special Issue 4382 Summer in Paris, 2018 Lives and works in Paris, France
2 Special Issue Soumisha Dauthel ART Habens video, 2013 394
ART Habens Soumisha Dauthel Special Issue Change your mind, 2018 403
Soumisha Dauthel Hello Soumisha and welcome to ART Habens. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production we would like to invite our readers to visit https://www.soumishadauthel.com in order to get a wide idea about your artistic production and we would start this interview with a couple of introductory questions. You are basically a self taught artist, but you have a multifaceted background that includes political science, literature and art: how did those formative years degree in Aix en Provence help you to create your unique attitude to experiment with different media? Moreover, how does your cultural substratum direct the trajectory of your current artistic research? These multidisciplinary training courses have enabled me first of all to gain knowledge in the differentiated fields you have mentioned. Then, over time, I drew links between them, it allowed me to develop a "flexible" mind, which accepts other thought proposals. Moreover, with parents of distinct culture and religion (Russian-Arabic) very early on my mind was built in comparison, cross-analysis with an exacerbated curiosity. Travelling to Asia, Africa, the USA and many European countries has reinforced this attitude of thinking, this way of thinking that will impact my view of art, my artistic research and my approach. The notions of "non-definitive", "in the making", "common memory", "nonchronological time" will integrate my personal life and of course my artistic research. I like to give this image, for me the 41 Special Issue An interview by , curator and curator painting is built in the encounter, in a dialogue with other paintings that would reveal an unpredictable painting. Thus, plastic and visual experimentation becomes the leitmotiv of my creation, and what I call "connecting" (the bringing together, the linking of materials) as an act of construction of the work. Questioning the history of art in this way, I allow myself to no longer conceive painting
Special Issue 2423 as a style or an absolute, but as a model of relationship to the world. For me, to be a painter today is to accomplish this passage. For this special edition of ART Habens we have selected Change your mind and Close but not quite, a couple of interesting ART Habens Soumisha Dauthel Just Human, end of 2018
Close but not quite, 2018 - Private Collection
Picnic, 2018
ART Habens 2451 Special Issue artworks that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of your unconventional style it's the way it allows you to condense in a single work of art such a coherent combination between intuition and a rigorous aesthetics: when walking our readers through your usual workflow and process, we would like to ask you if you think that there is a central idea that connects all your works. The two artworks "Change your mind and Close but not quite" humorously address my privileged themes (let's remain curious and attentive to the changes in our societies). These two titles of paintings correspond to the titles of two recent songs, listened to in the workshop. The music, its rhythm, its melody, its sound insistence intervene in my gaze when implementing a piece. Your question about the central idea that connects all my works is a very interesting and complicated at the same time, because at first sight my works look so different from one another. I'm going to reason out loud. What all my paintings would have in common is that each painting has its own form. They are composed of assembled elements, they are composed of different painting styles, more or less identifiable pictorial expressions and also of certain painted elements that can be found in several paintings. My main idea is to build a visual entity. We’d love to ask you about the qualities of the materials that you include in your artworks: how do you select them and what does you address to such a permanent search for new techniques and pictorial processes? In my youth I lived in the south of France and I admit that the movement supports/surfaces had a certain influence at the beginning of my research. And for the artists of my generation, opened up a free field for us to carry out plastic experiments. Perception, visual exercise remains very important in my work, the quality of my materials are essential so I create each of my materials. I like painting, drawing, engraving like many artists. I also enjoy revisiting the colours of classical painters, traditional fabrics, and tints used in various cultures. I have a sublimation relationship with the paint material, its texture, its fluidity, the paste, the energy of the colours, their dilutions. The realization of my materials corresponds to a time when I will manifest gestures of painting, a physical energy, a collective pictorial memory. When I create my material, I create it independently of its future use and without correlation with other materials. It is a time when the thought goes into "pause" mode and gives way to gestural expression, that of the body. It is painting that calls for painting. I let a feeling develop pictorially that will express itself in the moment. This feeling is of course imbued with my environment, the music I listen to, my mood, what I have experienced in recent or earlier times. It is the energy of life that is expressed through my body on canvas or large sheets of paper. I am closer to performance than to pictorial exercise. So every time, I have the freedom to paint as I feel it. I am talking about the technique of painting, but it can be that of Soumisha Dauthel
Special Issue 2463 drawing and engraving. The end of the exercise is when I no longer have any physical energy. All my materials are the traces of my life flow. We have really appreciated the vibrancy of thoughtful nuances of your arworks: likewise, we like the way Summer in Paris and It's My Destiny shows that vivacious tones are not indispensable in order to create tension and dynamics. How do you settle your color palette? And how much does your own psychological make-up determine the nuances of tones that you decide to include in a specific artwork in order to acheive such brilliant results? As for my "color palette ", I will use the term "materials palette " instead. It is made up of paintings created during periods of pictorial expression. The choice of my materials involves a long visual trial and error; I first observe oils, acrylics, on paper, on canvas, charcoal, inks, engraving proofs. Then come the colors, their liveliness, depths, nuances, substance, patterns, surface roughness or brilliance, the effects of runout, impasto. I then proceed without any preliminary sketches to draw and cut shapes. I bring the elements together until a dialogue takes shape, generates a specific energy, so that an entity imposes itself. It is the assembly process that will materialize the construction of the work. The bringing together, the linking of materials to each other, take most of my time. This is what I call the "Connecting" time. Put in contact materials, creating passages between them requires a great visual concentration that integrates uncertainties such as: What do they question, what do they tell us, where do they lead us ? What emotions do they carry? Then I confront the problems encountered when composing a painting. All the questions of plastic practice are added, the relationships between colors, mass, ART Habens Soumisha Dauthel
2471 Special Issue Soumisha Dauthel ART Habens It's my destiny, 2018
Special Issue 2483 ART Habens Soumisha Dauthel Together is better, 2018
2491 Special Issue Soumisha Dauthel ART Habens energy, tension, inner and outer forms, tension between the shape of the painting and its surface, direct or sibylline narratives. This long process can take several months. Marked out with a powerful narrative drive, your artworks shows captivating combination between abstraction and reference to recognizable patterns: in this sense, we daresay that your works seems to invite to question the idea of perceptionlook inside of what appear to be seen, rather than its surface, urging the spectatorship to see beyond the surface of the work of art. How important is for you to invite the viewers to elaborate personal meaning? And in particular, how open would you like your artworks to be understood? My abstract paintings are places of emergence of the imaginary, by bringing together differences in pictorial styles, unexpected colours and patterns. I like to think that my pictorial encounters united in a painting will immerse the viewer in an intense visual experience. The viewer encounters my paintings through sensitivity, visual perception, feeling. I have noticed that some spectators behave as if they were facing a person, they observe, discover and then only dialog. The paintings induce a visual experience with several dimensions of reading, the visual sensation, the narrative journey, perspective, in relief, leading some to talk about sculpture - painting. If you want - well, let's look together at Still meet and tell and Cultural Meeting. The first perception is a burst of colours that seem disharmonic while being attractive, for example, pink next to green. Then, as they approach the work, the coloured masses generate a fkind of harmony, in any case more embracing, more generous. These colours
Special Issue 24503 seem to communicate with each other, a luminous energy takes over (especially for Cultural Meeting). Then you notice that these colours are either flat tints or planes with often repetitive patterns without being identical. On the patterned plans the trace of the brush is visible. By swinging the head slowly from one side to the other, we can see the hybrid forms of lines that delimit territories of painting, like a drawing without materiality. There are also shiny surfaces and other matt surfaces on the same plane. You also notice that in each of the two paintings there are regular intertwining of grid- shaped lines with different plastic intentions, one tone on tone for Still meet and tell while in Cultural Meeting these intertwining are of different colours on a coloured background. You step back to see them again in their globality and there, for each of them, an external shape seems to cut through the wall. Despite their format differences, one 135 x 76 cm and Cultural Meeting 90 x 44 cm, the outlines of the paintings evoke the outline of a pencil stroke. And finally, if you look at the unity of the painting by pinching your eyes, half closed eyes, what happens to you, what do you see? Your artistic research is pervaded with philosophical and spiritual questions, and as you once remarked in a previous interview, you continuously explore the idea of ''the superposition of temporalities''. Reminding us of Anne Ancelin Schützenberger's theories, this aspect of your artistic journey seems to unveil the elusive, still ubiquitous influence of the past on our everyday life: how do you consider the concepts of memory and tradition playing within your work as an artist? And in particular, how closely Art can reflect its time? Each of my paintings contains materials that come from painting times, which can be several years old. When I choose them, assemble them, I connect times of memory that belong to moments in my life. Each painting fragment is a memory record that I unite in the present time of creation. This is how I interpret the "superposition of temporalities". It would be very enriching for me to discuss this notion with other disciplines. I remain amazed by the way we live while carrying within us an experience, a personal and collective history, knowledge, beliefs... I have a lot of respect for the life of the human being. When I was younger, when I was wondering about the notion of identity, I discovered the philosophy of the poet and writer Édouard Glissant. These thoughts allowed me to put words and images to my questions. And more than that, they reinforced the continuity of my research at the time on "rhizome identity" and " The linking up". Does art reflect its time ? All you have to do is visit a contemporary art gallery anywhere in the world to be quickly immersed in the questions posed by the works. These questions often focus on major societal issues or topics related to geopolitical situations. Creation reflects its time and all the apprehensions of peoples. The particularity of artistic creation is that it carries both its history and its future through its plastic questioning. I distinguish the ART Habens Soumisha Dauthel