Maria Chevska

Notes on saint’s hair…

19th January - 1st March 2020

"The paintings ‘Notes on saint’s hair...’ exhibited across m2 gallery are all recent, from 2018 and 2019.  I began working on these small canvases, 31cm x 26cm, after moving last year from a very large studio to a considerably smaller space –  which produced the sensation that everything I was working on was being seen too close, because any inner pictorial space contracted – and they became more intimate works compared to my larger (composite) paintings. These current works foreground painterly gestural marks, and a very close-up viewpoint. They also freely embrace a satirical element, a playfulness within their making, and intentions.
  
In all previous groups of works I have made reference to selected literary sources – using the textual as the philosophical ‘feed’ for an entire series. Yet, recognising that in the physical making the intuitive, and often chance marks and physicality of the medium becomes a generative process that ensures the paintings a life of their own.
  
The text that has informed my paintings over the past four years is Elergy 1 & 2, of the Duino Elergies by Rainer Maria Rilke. Completed at the end of WW1, through poetry they discursively express: power, the super-human, the numinous, and the human frailty of hope, for example. I am still engaged in this ongoing series of paintings, on linen, on paper, large and small, titled: Notes on saint’s hair…. they all reference the language within icons, yet also manifest contemporary echoes to ongoing beliefs and social power structures."  

Maria Chevska