26 April - 16 June, 2018

 

Spring has come to RKG with painting of two very distinct free styles:  Arif Lushi with free and vivid colours, and Natalia Laluq with the pulse matching our social and industrial landscape. Both artists embed our time via the freedom of paint.  

 

Arif Lushi’s painting resonates with the light and colour of nature. The vivid palette illuminates the canvas, entering a state of inner orderly chaos. Vast nature is met with vast desire, complex yet simple, saying, feeling, being. The physicality of the painting, from the way it is conceived and the way it appears, makes tangible memory of a reality, transforms the reality to memory of a tangible experience.  Arif Lushi's paintings spring from the moment with embedded permanence. 

 

Elements of gesture involve the moment as the weight of light.  Arif Lushi's paintings connect with freedom of expression, agreeing with post-modern painting but serving no aim, bringing cohesive resonance with eternal spring.

 

One of the prominent artists of his generation, Lushi resides in Tirana, Albania, where he has been active for three decades. Forever young in his approach to art and life, Arif's painting is synonymous with Albanian spring.  

 

 

Natalia Laluq’s social take on plein air escapes the post-modern experience and brings her work quickly out of Kiev's harsh cold conditions. Natalia chooses to paint on the back of her old works on canvas, recognizing that the material and energy will carry on - an unintended metaphor of Natalia's revisit to Kiev. 

 

The cold weather invites immediacy, matching urgency with a state of collapsing times loaded with feelings and thoughts, situations that similarly gathered for years within Natalia the artist. Kiev on canvas and Natalia en plein air:  Her nature and the environment connect physical memory, painting random surroundings, industrial and suburban Kiev. Adult migrated, detached outsider, Natalia is like a stream of insider information about life experience in her city, which she paints effortlessly, youthfully.

The work with elements of immediacy are resolved with maturity, experience, revealing concern, empathy and care. Conventions of painting plein air are rooted unconventionally.

 

Natalia Laluq studied painting and ceramics in Kiev, Ukraine. She now lives and works in Ottawa, Canada. This is Natalia's first exhibition of painting with RKG.