Armageddon: Mariano Chelo

Rather late in the day, as the exhibition is over, but here is my review of Armageddon at ArtMoorHouse:

Armageddon has begun in the City of London. The countdown to Apocalypse is over and an existential explosion has covered the ground floor walls of Moor House in Moorgate.

Mariano Chelo, from Bosa in Sardinia, is an abstract, installation and performance artist who founded MAP (Movementi Artistici Periferici), a gallery/workshop where he has exhibited his own and other artists’ works. While he has shown work internationally, this is his first solo show in the UK. In his work Chelo has journeyed from traditional beginnings – landscapes, still life and figure studies – through a period of collaboration with advertising agencies - as he abandoned painting for photography and graphic design in the 1980s – to the extravagant expressionism of his current abstractions and action painting performances.

Armageddon features paintings formed out of darkness. Beginning with inky blacks swirled and dripped and covered in the sheen and shimmer of varnish, these are works exploring the emotions of an underworld – physical or personal, in which a limited palette of colours, under pressure, boil and churn to rise in spurts and splurges of volcanic red. ‘Illusione Russo’ is split by a jet-black crevice from which beautiful surges of fiery oranges and reds flow to fill the canvas. ‘Confusamente Russo’ and ‘Russo’ fill their canvasses with the flicker and flare of flame.

Fire is, therefore, one motif Chelo uses for the experience of personal and social Armageddon. Water is another. Biblical motifs underpin much musing generally on apocalypse and Chelo, while not foregrounding Biblical references, certainly has images of deluge and flood within his frame. ‘Oblivion’, in particular, evokes - in blues, blacks and whites - the submerging of our world and consciousness. He ends the show more peacefully, using blacks, greys and whites, by depicting the stillness of the sea in evocative works (‘Mare’ and ‘Mare II’) which divide at the horizon as we are enveloped in darkness by the setting of the sun.

Chelo maintains a balance throughout between the personal, the natural and the social in these works. It could be personal and cultural apocalypse that we are viewing. At times, his shapes suggest cityscapes or caverns yet, here too, our perceptions can be both of physical chaos and of the collapse of our interior world. As the exhibition catalogue suggests, this sequence of images is a migration ‘through a deep dark sea’, ‘a “passage” towards the unexplored, a metaphor to express our inability to fully know the result of our quests.’

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Extreme - Politicalamity.

Mariano Chelo - Armageddon

I was at ArtMoorHouse this evening for the opening of  “Armageddon”, an exhibition of paintings by Mariano Chelo:

"In the Book of Revelation Armageddon is described as the final confrontation, the great battle between God and the False Prophet’s armies. A war necessitated by the fiendishly evil ambitions of humankind and their evil source of power.

While referring to a specific location, Armageddon carries also the profound symbolic meaning of Apocalypse, seen as the end of the world as we know it.

For Mariano Chelo Armageddon assumes a more personal interpretation, a meaning which is centred on the fear of demise. It is around this very concept that Mariano Chelo develops his entire artistic narrative. A deep inner conflict which is represented in his early works by a figurative and neo-cubist language dominated by heavy, insistent black brushstrokes.

A fear of the existential void appeased by the glimpse of traces of possible life in the final horizon, represented, as for the works on show, by an unlimited space where liquid transparent colours dominate and where red is paramount.

Mariano Chelo's human journey moves us and suggests to us possible existential pathways. It is an imaginary “migration”, a voyage through a deep dark sea, a “passage” towards the unexplored, a metaphor to express our inability to fully know the result of our quests.

It is the duty of the artist – as Chelo seems to suggest – to absorb the impurities and the pain of the human lives and to render them serene, purified to eyes of those who are able to decode the secret of art."

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Iona - And The Angels Dance.

Dialectical Materialism

In Dialectical Materialism, the current exhibition at ArtMoorHouse, three artists are showing, each of whom 'approach their work from different directions - intention towards intuitive form, light balanced with matter, representation of an abstract idea - but ultimately can find common ground.' Their focus in this exhibition is on dialogues - between the artists and their material, between the artists and the external world, or Nature, and also between the works shown - in order to 'give rise to new syntheses, new forms, new ideas.'

David Degreef-Mounier 'uses materials for their ability to be transformed, for their malleability and their metamorphic properties, in order to explore new landscape of the mind.' 'His research revolves around a Lacan quotation: "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think". It translates in his work by a series of ongoing experiments, where, by rejecting expectations and preconceptions, he is able to accept what is happening here and now. He states: "Art is not simply an object, nor does it exist solely in the mind. Rather it is the relationship between the two”.'

Phil Dobson has developed a 'technique of layering and sanding acrylic, building up relief and then eroding it; which acknowledges, in the resulting flatness, 'a schematic way of representing the world.' His work combines 'amorphous form and precise delineation, the fluidity of paint with the rigour of geometry, the symbolic colour of maps with the luminosity of stained glass.'

Ileana Arnaoutou says that the stepping-stone of every work she creates 'is a walk, a treasure haunt in the city.' Discarded objects have always intrigued her creativity as, inspired by the culture of her country, she believes 'that every element has its own history and forms by that way its own character.' She feels she rescues 'objects and materials, bringing them back to life, by dismantling and combining them together, by lighting them up.' The ancient Egyptian ritual of weighing the heart has played a pivotal role in building up the conceptual aspect of her works. She says: 'Weighing the heart with a feather, for me is an amazing symbolic structure, which is mostly present in everything in life. My aim is to create and imagine scales, imagine the possible two sides, imagine their relationship.
My sculptures weight light and colour with matter, soul with human body. The "results” and combinations are infinite and that is what makes me want to create.'

The next exhibition at the Gallery will be Armageddon by Mariano Chelo, who 'has developed a surrealistic, abstract and cubistic oriented language to express his ... themes.' In 2003 he founded MAP, “Movimenti Artistici Periferici”, an art gallery/workshop where he exhibits personal and other artirts’ works from all over the world. Besides his painting production, his work includes: art installations, “action painting” performances and computerised art.

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Pēteris Vasks - The Fruit Of Silence.