REFLET Print

By ILEANA CORNEA, historian and art critic, in collaboration with the contemporary art magazine Artension. Disguised images of the unconscious; Kloe Vano's lyrical abstract paintings open the reservoir of emotion and affect. She takes us, body and soul, on an exploration of color, space, depth and textures. We are presented with a mysterious labyrinth of visual information in a secret language. Textures, or materialization of memory. Layers of transparent white paint obliterate or obscure the vibrant red geometric areas underneath. One is scarcely able to discern the meadows in their springtime colors, the lighthearted greens and yellows. The artist, protects, cherishes and blurs the underlying chromatic symphony, leaving her audience to contemplate the melancholic radiograph of a time gone by. Another canvas, with its woody texture recalling a palisade, a makeshift door or an old broken window, seems to be covered with a whitewash that is flaking and peeling. We experience the two bloody brush strokes as the traces, the signs or the remains of a violent act. The artiste handles her material with perspicacity. She knows how to give it consistence, or to take it away. She is master of all that concerns tactile perception: Roughness, scratching, weaving, glazing. In the Textures series, Kloe Vano succeeds in making the paint a skin bearing witness to an obscured past. Oneiric Journey (Voyage onirique) or emotion in nature's image From the first to the last canvas of the series Voyage onirique, we are invited to make our way through a number of initiatory stages. The first canvas appears mineral, specular, phantom-like, sidereal... One has the impression of a winter landscape, pine trees reflected in an ice-covered lake. In the second, the light is diffused, the air is in movement, the colors shift, the purples crackle, and the humidity gives rise to awakening desire around a central form reminiscent of the phallus of Pan. In the third canvas, the flora is shown in all its glory, like the roses in Monet's garden. The blue, intensified by white, as in an iced-over lake, contributes a feeling of freshness, the greens recall the shade, the reds and the yellows an impression of excess and exuberance. The final canvas of the series, by its juxtapositions of compact, diluted, warm and cold paintwork is a celebration of nature.