Camille Ver’s cityscapes at Galerie Stephanie
URBAN spaces are rife with potential for the abstract artist. Camille Ver, in her sixth one-woman show, “URBN,” explores these possibilities through acrylic works on canvases that are interspersed with details of tech-pen lines. These new additions to her oeuvre are rampant with the energy of a loud, boisterous city juxtaposed with the cool, calming power of abstraction.
Ver’s works are an archetype of cityscapes. The audience is often treated to a collage of familiar sites that are neither here nor there. There are often anecdotal references to older structures—and Ver considers even incomplete and crumbling buildings not necessarily to focus on their aesthetic properties—but the intent is to recreate the emotional resonance one gains from an urban location.
The broader composition of acrylic is then layered with lines drawn in with technical lines endowing the artwork with an architectural perspective, bringing detail and order to an otherwise blurred form.
These lines could very well represent the hard lines of an actual cityscape—created in part by a mixture of power cables, laundry lines, telephone poles and the steel bars of a construction site.
In Ver’s oeuvre, they represent a framing element, allowing viewers to contextualize the compositions as works exploring the urban perspective while remaining true to the sensibilities of abstraction within the realm of visual art—highly reminiscent of, say, Wassily Kandinsky’s work.
In works such as “Inhabited Sculpture,” Ver experiments with earth and industrial colors against a primer of white. She creates a ring of blockish shapes in these colors, culminating in the smoggy black center shape and crisscrossed with technical lines that have become a characteristic recurring motif.
Show runs until Feb. 21 at Galerie Stephanie in Libis.
Galerie Stephanie is at Unit 1B Parc Plaza Bldg., 183 E. Rodriguez Ave. (C5), Libis, Quezon City; tel. 7091488; e-mail galeriesteph anie@yahoo.com; visit www.galerie stephanie.com