Rhea Carmi at Frank Pictures Gallery

Saturday, 05 April 2008 20:24

Santa Monica, CA - Frank Pictures Gallery is privileged to present Light In The Dark by Jerusalem born artist Rhea Carmi. To grow up in Israel is to experience the world both as an upheaval and as a sanctuary. Rhea Carmi, in these vivid abstract compositions captures both the anguish and the peace of her own experience and that of her husband Meir, a Holocaust survivor. Her paintings are prayers. Carmi utilizes a variety of media: oils, sand, water, treated paper, canvas and wood; which she layers, smoothes and sculpts to create an intimate landscape that demands a tactile as well as visual response.

Her work, recently acquired by the Museum of Tolerance and exhibited at the Riverside and Torrance Art Museums, speaks eloquently of both what it is to endure, and that what we must endure. “In response to war Carmi’s palette and her formal vocabulary changed”, writes renowned curator and critic Peter Frank, “becoming simpler, more sober, more contemplative, turning inward. Some pieces took on the foreboding gloom of war. Into a few of these Carmi introduced soft, even three-dimensional shapes, as if to insist on the reality of human frailty but to also to celebrate somehow the defiant persistence of human sensuality. Such an existential gesture, a positing of the human against the void, suits Rhea Carmi’s style.

Carmi insists that we still live with the constant threat of annihilation and that the human spirit cannot and will not be stifled by the threat. Simple or complex, agitated or calm, but always poised and luminous, these paintings argue that, even in the face of death, humanity triumphs.”

Visit Frank Pictures Gallery at: http://frankpicturesgallery.com/home.html