Grosvenor Gallery presents: Angeli Sowani’s latest exhibition, Seraphim, shows once more that this artist is not afraid of taking risks or, one would be tempted to say, is not afraid of playing with fire literally and metaphorically. In her previous exhibition Vaahan Sowani had used the blowtorch as a brush to show us a world pitched between the liveliness of fire and the sombre fragility of its charcoaled traces. In Seraphim she continues her existential reflections on impermanence and change, fragility and transformation while bringing her formal explorations to further extremes. The series Within, Sunscapes and Earthscapes present to us her recent works with fire while Waterscapes introduces us to Sowani’s experimentations with black enamel paint. Estranged yet organic, the paintings mark a crucial new moment in the journey between figuration and abstraction, which has characterised most of Sowani’s work.
Unlike previously, in Within, Sunscapes, and Earthscapes the flame is not used only to mark and draw on the canvas. Sowani let the flame scar the paintings deeply, leaving them gaping with holes. Wishing to engage with a surface half consumed by fire has led her to adopt a smaller scale and work layering charred canvas upon canvas as if they were sheets of paper. The results were three series of an intimate and introspective nature characterised by a most delicate and precious materiality. Within is perhaps the uncanniest of the three. In these paintings the canvas is almost entirely burned, a leaf of deep browns and blacks with gnawed dark edges and gashed by holes. Layered beneath, one notices the unprimed front of another charred canvas. From its gashes slivers of orange, silver and gold glow forth turning the gaps into fuming cinders and adding spatial depth to the works. Embers, the paintings seem to remind us, always contain the glow of fire.
In the Sunscapes series the artist seems to have turned from within to celestial heights, to the sky or to paradise. If gold could only be glimpsed in the series Within, here it explodes in the concentrated form of the sun or the halo, an image the artist had already engaged with in the Man or God paintings. In Sunscapes golden suns or halos speak of heavens as much as of earth and as their golden disks crack and leak birthing the ghost of a flame, it is impossible not to recognise sensuous female forms. This exchange, contiguity or promiscuity between heavens and earth, inner depths and outer world is encountered also in the series Earthscapes. Here blue seraphs inspired by the mosaics of the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul flutter in a sky that weeps burning cinders.
As the artist herself has suggested, the seraphs do not serve as a specific religious reference. Rather they are another image born by the snaking shapes of the flames. Perhaps, they are a more compassionate incarnation of the flames themselves as the seraphs in the paintings attend a troubled humanity caressing the earth with their blue wings. The last series Waterscapes plunges us instead into a world of congealed shadows, cool waters and darkness. Inks and paint are the medium here not fire, and black impenetrable winged shapes are the protagonists. Crowding the canvas like bats in a cave, these shadowy elements seem to mark the counterpart of angels, halos, and flames leading us deep below the embers into the secrecy of the earth.
Sowani is an artist who has travelled and she surely has learnt that images always travel a little further. Born out of differences and specificities which remain so important in many aspects of our lives, images can also run loose suggesting new links and connections. Sowani has taken us onto some of these unexpected journeys. Inner worlds, Sunscapes, Earthscapes, Waterscapes: her works are flesh of the world, yet transform it anew.
-by: Dr. Elena Bernardini, PhD at SOAS, London. Focusing on Installation Art in India
