Peny Manavi
The Apparent and the Imperceptible

The Apparent and the Imperceptible

Nature which surrounds us always calls forth question and exclamation marks, while, nevertheless, remaining a great, unknown, and complex entity - one which provokes a contest between our existential convention and itself, without ever being entirely explicable in a deterministic way, but also without being totally unexpected, given that nothing in Nature is repeated, as it evolves through variations, exceptions to its rules, its particularities, its paradoxes, and its functional adaptations in the light of prevailing conditions.

Where Nature, its mutations, and phenomenologies are concerned, we know how the need for transcendental human reference, for worship directed towards it and its mysteries came about, but born at the same time was the need for research into its visible and unseen world - a world which we 'present' as a stance of our own life, while in parallel this world defines us through the proximities and distances which we take up, as well as through the parameters which we define as we activate our senses, our reason, and our imagination.

Peny Manavi does not simply, in terms of expression, give a rendering of Nature in order to delight the eye. She uses the delight and attraction which Nature evokes as a mirroring of our inner self and the moods which her pictures generate within us in order for her to shape in her art the states of flux, the minglings, and the metamorphoses contained in the agonising consciousness which traces out origins of descent and symbiotic confrontations  between organic and inorganic matter. This is matter which extends into its 'depths and breaths' by the catalytic action of light and time.

The artist's recent 'landscapes' deal with the meanings themselves which stem from her complex style, which includes an interweaving of transubstantiated idioms, derived from expressionism of design, post-impressionist contrasting of colours, and from the limpidity, intensity, and lucidity of a Fauvist approach, but combined with the gestural dynamic of lyrical abstraction. These 'landscapes' involve the synergy and interaction of the plant and animal kingdom, whether these activities are sited in the fields and meadows (with the dialectical juxtaposing of insects and flowers), or this is revealed in the seas' depths, where time is counted differently and the manner of our approach alternates the wonderful with the dramatic element or the strange with the minor, and the present with the fleeting.   

The freshness, joyfulness, a feast of colour and design of a sui generis sensuousness which Peny Manavi is offering us in her works is to be identified with the tragic quality, the unforeseen 'breaches' of continuity, the grand style, and mystery in these uninvited 'views' of her plains and depths, but also of a space-time channel which the artist opens up for us, in order to initiate us into the 'tiny' and the 'greatest', by relativising the distances between them.

The dream element and the factor of the imagination imbue and at the same time transubstantiate what realism the representations possess, and these send a message to our unprejudiced eye about the continuous reshapings and transformations of the births, the encounters, the deaths, and the on-going cycles of life, in the perpetual burgeoning of its development.

Above all, the artist's chief concern is the composition of surfaces and background, of structures and axes, of style and manner, of colour shades and tonicities in her works, which involve a rhythmic musicality, while making their appearance through a stratigraphical variety of densities, tensions, and matter from what is, anyway, her sensitive brush-stroke. The relation of dialectic between structures and surfaces in any event informs us about the 'historicity' of the shaping of the subject, which is not made of some sort of serial sequence, given that one level of 'script' penetrates and is internally linked with the next, animating it and giving us the sense of an organic cohesion of events and activities. These processes, like the visible actions, the attributes, the phenomenological appearances, and the states both of the seen and of the unseen life of Nature suggest a feeling of the approachability and at the same time the inaccessibility of this reality, through the calm and the silence by which it is possessed.

The painting of Peny Manavi functions to convey knowledge, as allegory, and as metonymy. The 'landscapes' of her mind and imagination, desires, and the explorations through art of her gaze, as well as the deepenings and penetrations of the consciousness which she undertakes by 'clarifying' the sought-after and unknown fields of Nature, give meaning to her artistic language and gesture. By way of her pictures, one can discern the awareness of the qualities and the ethos which the artist endeavours to lend to the entity of what is represented in each of her compositions. These characteristics alert us to an artistic individuality, with a rich and spontaneous talent, with a capability for expression and a control over the medium constantly exercised, which Peny Manavi employs in order to convert the random or any conventionality into a striking and delectable result, a result which has many levels and is replete with internally conflicting emotive charges.

Peny Manavi engages in introspection as she paints. By means of the articulations of the 'notes' of her painting, she succeeds in calling forth 'exclamations' which give rise to creative stimuli and dispositions of soul and intellect in the beholder, so that he undertakes (through the interactive quality of each of her works) the creation of an exploratory 'thread of Ariadne'. By spectroscopic contemplation and through a blissful phantasmagoria, the viewer undertakes to find his way through the passes and the perplexities which the labyrinthine world of known and, in the end, unknown (unforeseen) Nature presents him with. This is a path of self-knowledge and personal choices in the face of the insoluble-seeming  enigmas which, in any event, the very complexity of life brings to light.     

Athena Schina

Critic and Art Historian