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Rhea Carmi - Israeli born abstract artist painter A body of work which depicts brutality and insanity of war and its resultant human suffering both physical and spiritual. The desert landscape is used to show the everlasting human spirit that is resilient to survive the aridity and harshness of the elements. A prolific landscape is used as a backdrop to formulate inner beauty of life in its joy of birth and spirit.
Rhea Carmi was born in Jerusalem, Israel, a land that is spiritual and
passionate; searing and volatile. These words very well describe the
artist as well as her works. Rhea, over the last twenty-seven years
produced a body of work that celebrates with antiquity the everlasting
human spirit, which survives the brutality, and insanity of war, aridity
and harshness of human nature as it endures.
Rhea utilizes a variety of media: oils, sand, water, treated paper,
canvas and wood; which she layers, smooths and sculpts to create the
abstract impressions, which demand tactile as well as visual interplay.
Her works (over 350 paintings) are perceived as the topography of
intimate landscapes, as well as the mapping of emotions and sensations
devoid of familiar forms. The paintings are a personal diary of the
artist as she chronicles the events that had an impact on humanity and
nature.
These works combine to express the feelings of introspection, conflict,
human emotion, and the effects of malicious wielding of power and greed
on humanity.
Rhea's work has been exhibited in Israel, Europe, Australia, Germany,
New York and Los Angeles. She now resides in California with her husband
of 45 years.
LA Contemporary, Press Release, August 2007
Out of Darknes and into Light by Roberta Carasso, Ph.D., May, 2007
Dark Series Essay by Peter Frank, April 2007
Carnaval by Peter Frank, July 2006
Humanity's Image by Peter Frank, April 2005
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Resilience I
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 36) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Resilience III
Mixed media on canvas (36 x 48) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Resilience IV
Mixed media on canvas (30 x 40) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Resilience VI
Mixed media on canvas (40 x 30) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Resilience VII
Wood on Wood (38 x 24) 1978
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Resilience VIII
Mixed media on canvas (24 x 36) 1997
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Resilience X
Mixed media on canvas (40 x 30) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Resilience XII
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 40) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Resilience XIII
Mixed media on canvas (24 x 18) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence I
Mixed media on canvas (46 x 46 x 4.5) 2005
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence II
Mixed media on canvas (36 x 36 x 2.5) 2005
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence III
Mixed media on canvas (36 x 36 x 2.5) 2005
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence IV
Mixed media on canvas (36 x 36 x 2.5) 2005
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence V
Mixed media on canvas (42 x 30 x 2.5) 2005
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence VI
Mixed media on canvas (42 x 30 x 2.5) 2005
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence VII
Mixed media on canvas (42 x 30 x 2.5) 2005
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence VIII
Mixed media on canvas (42 x 30 x 2.5) 2005
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence IX
Mixed media on canvas (30x30 x 3) 2005
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence X
Mixed media on canvas (40 x 40) 2005
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence XI
Mixed media on canvas (30x30 x 4) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence XII
Mixed media on canvas (30x30 x 4) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence XIII
Mixed media on canvas (30x30 x 4) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence XIV
Mixed media on canvas (30x30 x 4) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence XV
Mixed media on canvas (30x30 x 4) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence XVI
Mixed media on canvas (60x48 x 4) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence XVII
Mixed media on canvas (60 x 48) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence XVIII
Mixed media on board (72 x 48) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence XX
Mixed media on canvas (30 x 30) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence XXI
Mixed media on linen (48 x 72 diptych) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence XXII
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 72 quadriptych) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence XXIII
Mixed Media on panel (48 x 90) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence XXIV
Mixed Media on panel (48 x 92) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence XXV
Mixed media on canvas (36 x 48) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence XXVI
Mixed media on canvas (30 x 40) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence XXVII
Mixed Media on panel (48 x 48) 2005
Rhea Carmi - Les Voix du Silence XXVIII
Mixed Media on panel (48 x 48) 2005
Rhea Carmi - Triangles XVIII
Mixed Media on cardboard mounted on wood (22 x 29) 1981
Rhea Carmi - Triangles XX
Mixed Media on cardboard mounted on wood (22 x 29) 1981
Rhea Carmi - Triangles XXI
Mixed Media on cardboard mounted on wood (22 x 29) 1981
Rhea Carmi - Triangles XXII
Mixed Media on cardboard mounted on wood (22 x 29) 1981
Rhea Carmi - Triangles XV
Mixed Media on cardboard mounted on wood (22 x 29) 1981
Rhea Carmi - Triangles VII
Mixed Media on Masonite (30 x 24) 1981
Rhea Carmi - Triangles XIV
Mixed Media on cardboard mounted on wood (22 x 29) 1981
Rhea Carmi - Triangles XVII
Mixed Media on cardboard mounted on wood (22 x 29) 1981
Rhea Carmi - Triangles XVI
Mixed Media on cardboard mounted on wood (22 x 29) 1981
Rhea Carmi - Triangles XII
Mixed Media on cardboard mounted on wood (22 x 29) 1981
Rhea Carmi - Triangles XIII
Mixed Media on cardboard mounted on wood (22 x 29) 1981
Rhea Carmi - Triangles III
Mixed Media on Masonite (30 x 24) 1981
Rhea Carmi - Triangles IX
Mixed Media on Masonite (30 x 24) 1981
Rhea Carmi - Triangles IV
Mixed Media on Masonite (30 x 24) 1981
Rhea Carmi - Triangles VIII
Mixed Media on Masonite (30 x 24) 1981
Rhea Carmi - Triangles V
Mixed Media on Masonite (30 x 24) 1981
Rhea Carmi - Triangles II
Mixed Media on Masonite (30 x 24) 1981
Rhea Carmi - Carnaval I
Mixed media on canvas (36 x 36) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Carnaval II
Mixed media on canvas (36 x 36) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Carnaval III
Mixed media on canvas (36 x 36) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Carnaval IV
Mixed media on canvas (36 x 36) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Carnaval V
Mixed media on canvas (36 x 48) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Carnaval VI
Mixed media on canvas (60 x 40) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Carnaval VII
Mixed media on canvas (60 x 40) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Carnaval VIII
Mixed media on canvas (40 x 30) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Carnaval IX
Mixed media on canvas (30 x 30) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Carnaval X
Mixed media on canvas (24 x 36) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Carnaval XIII
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 36) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Carnaval XIV
Mixed media on linen (48 x 36) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Carnaval XV
Mixed media on canvas (36 x 36) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Carnaval XVI
Mixed media on canvas (36 x 36) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Carnaval XVII
Mixed media on canvas (40 x 30) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Carnaval XVIII
Mixed media on linen (30 x 30) 2006
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit I - Genesis
Mixed media on canvas (40 x 90 triptych) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit II
Mixed media on canvas (60 x 144 triptych) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit VIII - Resurrection
Mixed media on canvas (36 x 24) 1993
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XX - Life Cycle
Mixed media on canvas (40 x 90 triptych) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XX - Life Cycle (a)
Mixed media on canvas (40 x 30) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XX - Life Cycle (b)
Mixed media on canvas (40 x 30) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XX - Life Cycle (c)
Mixed media on canvas (40 x 30) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XXVIII
acrylic & oil (48 x 36) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XXI
Mixed media on canvas (40 x 30 diptych) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XXI
Mixed media on canvas (40 x 30 diptych) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit LIV
Mixed media on canvas (24 x 36) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit LVII
acrylic & oil (24 x 18) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XVI
Mixed media on canvas (40 x 30) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XI - Caroming Back and Forth in Time
Mixed media on canvas (36 x 24) 1998
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XVII - Particle Art I
Mixed media on canvas (40 x 120 quadriptych) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XVII - Particle Art I (a)
Mixed media on canvas (40 x 30) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XVII - Particle Art I (b)
Mixed media on canvas (40 x 30) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XVII - Particle Art I (c)
Mixed media on canvas (40 x 30) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XVII - Particle Art I (d)
Mixed media on canvas (40 x 30) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XVIII - Particle Art II
Mixed media on canvas (30 x 40) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XXVII
Mixed media on canvas (36 x 48) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XXIX
Mixed media on canvas (30 x 40) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XXXI - Enliven
acrylic & oil (40 x 30) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XXXII - Enliven
acrylic & oil (48 x 36) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XXXIII - Enliven
acrylic & oil (48 x 36) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XXXIV - Enliven
acrylic & oil (48 x 36) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XXXV - Enliven
acrylic & oil (48 x 36) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XXXVI - Enliven
acrylic & oil (42 x 30) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XXXVII - Enliven
acrylic & oil (48 x 36) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XXXVIII - Enliven
acrylic & oil (48 x 36) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XXXIX - Enliven
acrylic & oil (48 x 36) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XL - Enliven
acrylic & oil (40 x 30) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XLI - Enliven
acrylic & oil (60 x 48) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit LX
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 36) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XLIII
Mixed media on canvas (30 x 42 diptych) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XLIII
Mixed media on canvas (30 x 42 diptych) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit LIX
Mixed media on canvas (60 x 84 quadriptych) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XLVI
acrylic & oil (48 x 36) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XLVII
acrylic & oil (48 x 36) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XLVIII
acrylic & oil (48 x 36) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit XLIX
acrylic & oil (36 x 48) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit VII
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 36) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit VI
Mixed media on canvas (40 x 30) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Everlasting Spirit III - Ever Green
Mixed media on canvas (36 x 24) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XXIV
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 60) 1998
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles I - Shattered Rod Cross
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 36) 1991
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles II
Mixed media on canvas (36 x 24) 1991
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles III
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 36) 1991
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles IV
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 40) 1991
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles V - Unleashed
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 40) 1991
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles VI
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 60) 1998
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles VII - Out On A Limb
Mixed media on canvas (60 x 48) 1997
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles VIII
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 36) 1998
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XVI
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 36) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XXI - Imprisoned
Mixed media on canvas (30 x 40) 1996
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XXII
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 36) 2002
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XXIII - Homage to Lost Astronauts
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 36) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XXVI
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 72 diptych) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XXVII - Chaos
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 60) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XXVIII - Survivers Dance
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 60) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XXIX
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 108 triptych) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XXXII
Mixed media on canvas (24 x 36) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XXXIII
Mixed media on canvas (60 x 48) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XXXVI
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 36) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XXXVII - Trapped
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 36) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XXXVIII
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 36) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XXXIX
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 36) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XLI
Mixed media on canvas (48 x 36) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XLIII - Windows
Mixed media on canvas (30 x 40) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XLVIII
acrylic & oil (36 x 48) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XLIX
Mixed media on canvas (40 x 30) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles L
Mixed media on canvas (36 x 48 diptych) 2004
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XLII
Mixed media on canvas (36 x 24 triptych) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XLII
Mixed media on canvas (36 x 24 triptych) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XLII
Mixed media on canvas (36 x 24 triptych) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XX - Rejection
Mixed media on canvas (40 x 30) 2003
Rhea Carmi - Humanity's Struggles XIII - Falling Apart and Coming Together
Mixed media on canvas (40 x 30) 2003
(August 11 - September 1 2007)
Opening Reception: August 11 2007, 6-9 pm
LAC is very pleased to introduce 2 solo exhibitions by two female artists, Rhea Carmi and Daena Title. Although these artists share the same Jewish heritage, they convey their own distinct styles and personal voice through their art.
Rhea Carmi was born in Jerusalem, Israel and married to her husband who is a holocaust survivor. Over the last 25 years, "The Everlasting Human Spirit" in Carmi's sub-consciousness has always been embedded in her artwork. Carmi's art is about the celebration of human resilience, which survives the cruelty and lunacy of war and the severity of human nature.
In "Les Voix Du Silence" (The Voices of Silence), 7 pieces in her dark series, a range from 8' to 2', will be displayed. Carmi is a prolific artist and uses a variety of mediums in her work. She uses mixed media on canvas including acrylic, cardboards, cheese-cloth, and wire. Although her subject matter is dark, the tranquility in her work radiates hope and projects the true essence of "The Everlasting Human Spirit" that's within her Being.
Rhea Carmi's art is a profound search to make visual the darkest and most illuminated aspects of the human condition. The artist leads us through a succession of piercing abstract narratives from the grim ashes of suffering, passed the horrors of human cruelty, to emerge into the light of healing, compassion, and the ebullient joy of freedom.
Carmi's three artistic series, entitled: "Humanities Struggles", "Humanities Resilience", and "Everlasting Spirit", are at once painful and glorious, powerful yet unsettling. Although they are individual series, there is continuity, as Carmi reveals a path from Humanities Struggles to Everlasting Spirit, albeit uneven, circuitous, and unpredictable.
The artist uses few references to known symbols, preferring to capture the visual essence of pain to healing rather than lock into particular pre-determined configurations. Instead, she weaves vivid abstract compositions with mixed media, intense dark and light colors, sharp and soft lines, and geometric and organic shapes. These iconic narrations convey, through passionate calligraphy and emotions, extremes of human experiences, its depths and its heights; and thus, evoke hidden primal feelings in all who are receptive
Born Israeli, and married, for 46 years, to a Holocaust survivor, the subject of human suffering that plagues her people is second nature. For thousands of years, great Talmudic sages contemplated and explained how all-consuming darkness can cast an enormous shadow on life, yet can be a force that brings tremendous spiritual transformation. With an unbreakable connection to this ancient wisdom, Carmi's art conveys a premonition of a Messianic age when all evil will be annihilated.
Carmi's nation continuously experiences conflict and struggle. It is integral to life, making an intrepid people even stronger. With this innate vigor, the artist stands fearlessly in front of each blank canvas or naissance sculpture, and with every artistic process, explores the subject of darkness, to discover and shape in physical form, the purpose of light: to bring hope, justice, beauty, the true essence of each human being.
Confronting powerful subjects, Carmi's art is dramatic. Referencing past and current historical themes, her art is political. Yet, her creations are timeless and transcendent as the artist does battle with each human demon. Consequently, her art describes grief and the fragile strength of the human soul, while leading us to an impassioned state of healing and bliss. In the end, Carmi's art is an eternal prayer, a wail that pleads for the incomprehensible to be finally understood and laid to rest.
Roberta Carasso, Ph.D.
Elected Member of the International Art Critics Association
May 22, 2007
By Peter Frank
War catches even the warlike by surprise. The warred-upon sleep with one eye open, and expect such surprises; but even they can be caught off-guard. Last summer, Israel surprised itself, going into Lebanon after Hezbollah. And it surprised itself further, by battling only to a compromise, failing to gain its strategic goals, and providing its enemy the propagandistic upper hand. Was the war mismanaged? Was it ill-advised? For the Israeli populace and the world, these are now political questions; for the Israeli military, they are questions of policy, strategy, tactics. It was, as the saying goes, a learning experience. It was a bleak time for the Jewish state, and the repercussions have not subsided.
Rhea Carmi watched the events of this last Middle East conflict unfold from half a globe away, but she might as well have been right there. Indeed, she had been weeks before, visiting homeland and family. At that point she was in a state of near-bliss, delighting in her family and her art and her life - the state of mind in which those who know Rhea usually find her. She was painting a series based on Mardi Gras - not the Catholic rite, but its near-pagan manifestation in places like Rio de Janeiro and New Orleans, Cologne and Basel, eruptions of giddy, sustained transgression where silly rather than somber, prankish rather than proper, behavior is the order of the day. (It's no accident that Purim, the Jewish version of this festival of assumed identities, nearly coincides in the calendar with the Latin version.) Carmi's series brims with color and image; human visages, distorted into Carnaval guises, fill each canvas as never before in her work, even though they eventually dissolve into stuttering masses of vivid brushstrokes.
The grim reality of strife and its unsettled aftermath - the summer's war left all its protagonists in more precarious positions, but Israel most of all - made it impossible for Carmi to continue her festival of masks. The mask of war had been donned, and when it came off, it left a scar. Worse, once Israel pushed its clouds towards its horizon, others gathered at the edges of Carmi's own family, as one of its youngest members battled a grave illness. Her optimism already compromised, Carmi had to marshal what was left to sustain her loved ones' spirits. As usual, she did so in life; and she poured her deepest feelings into her art.
And as usual, Carmi's did not simply pour out her deepest feelings in dramatic or lugubrious expressions. Her palette and her formal vocabulary changed, becoming simpler, more sober, more contemplative, turned inward. Some pieces took on the foreboding gloom the war - all wars, but this one most especially - warranted. Into a few of these Carmi introduced soft, even three-dimensional shapes, as if to insist on the reality of human frailty but also to celebrate somehow the defiant persistence of human sensuality. Some of the warworks Carmi rendered in a quietly luminous copper hue, restricting the imagery to minimalistic devices but building into the panel, so that these visual barriers seemed to have windows built into them. Other minimal works posited white forms - myriad dots or lines, configured into regular patterns - on near-black grounds, manifesting a longing for order and harmony in real life. And still others displayed the rhythmic and coloristic variety of the Mardi Gras series, but muted and balanced into coherent "maps" of seemingly urban environs.
In fact, all these kinds of images had appeared before in Carmi's oeuvre, as recently as the previous year and as far back as her emergence as a new talent in Israel in the early 1980s. By mining her own previous artwork, Carmi re-explored the resonance of her past accomplishments, and therein found added potential for profound emotion. In the face of existential threat, Carmi took stock of her extant comprehensions of the world (for that's what artworks are) and, needing something to reaffirm the world as much to herself as to her audience, she found those earlier comprehensions applicable. Having averred that the world need not be a tragic place, Carmi was now rediscovering how to deal with the fact that it so often is.
Carmi's responses to a time of war and disillusionment clearly embody feelings of anxiety, pessimism, and confusion. But, again, a persistent glow of hope glimmers around the edges of even the darkest of the Dark Series. Native to a country born in the face of annihilation and existing ever since in the face of dissolution, Carmi does not sustain her hope on naïve faith, but on real experience and persistent vision. She, her people, and all of humanity are still here, and so far are still dying only one by one. Her own family has so far averted tragedy, for which the anxiety of hospitalization and treatment is small price to pay. Those of her passions Carmi heeds must lead to the forging of images and monuments, not to small diaristic exercises in self-pity. She may work in a variety of formulations and a variety of moods, but every shape and sensation, no matter how shadowed or subdued, must aspire to the profound, and, like a good stage play, must ring with a variety of emotion.
Great art, Carmi knows, is great in its embrace of complexity. Complexity, Carmi knows instinctively, requires contradictory sentiments of the same artwork. An artwork's simplicity, as she demonstrates time and again - and never more than in these recent Dark works - reveals not the rawness of its feeling, but the intricacy of its depth. Those blacks of hers are not mere stains on a panel, but are voids waiting to be populated by stars. Those patterns of hers are not doodle or decoration, but the elaboration of sensation upon surface. The "windows" hewn into fields of metallic green reveal not just the structure of the object, but the conflicting nature of existence, where an opening can be a trap, and a wall can be a passageway.
Emotions are messy things. Fortunately, in her nearly thirty years of artmaking, Rhea Carmi has consistently leapt into her own emotions, but has never succumbed to their chaos. Rather, by channeling her feelings - and by extension ours - into a broad but limited formal vocabulary, she has endowed them with eloquence. At the toughest of times, such eloquence must reflect despair and resilience at once. The Dark Series radiates such contrasting sentiments, well past the events that provoked them. Indeed, the true resonance of the Dark Series may emerge in happier times, when they serve to remind us that good fortune is as fleeting as bad, and that life is briefer than art.
Los Angeles
April 2007
Rhea Carmi remembers vividly her visit to Rio de Janeiro at Carnaval. It was, she says, a delirious, heightened moment of magic, color, sound and laughter. But she remembers other such moments, and has read about and witnessed others. Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Fasching in Basel, the Purims of Carmi's childhood in Israel, and even the relatively tame - or at least tamed - Hallowe'ens that knock on her door every harvest season, all are manifestations of the human need to revel, transform, and put the everyday away in the closet. Non-western societies employ the mask routinely in religious ritual; in our civilization(s), the mask manifests, if anything, an irreligious gesture. But universally, when the mask goes on, the theater of life suddenly becomes the life of theater.
Carmi's "Carnaval" series of paintings reminds us of the power and allure of masking - and the human need to mask. The canvases brim with hot, exquisite color, broken into so many shards; they also brim with grotesque faces, stylized depictions of the false visages that crowd the streets every year in sanctioned ecstasy. They are more than simple impressions of scheduled social fantasy; they are attempts to plunge into that spirit and come out the other side, at once terrified and refreshed. Clearly, these rhythmic renditions of spiky, dopey faces or leaping figures are not expressionist essays in fear; their palette and their exuberant pulse bespeak only pleasure. But there is nothing as frightening as a tidal wave, even - perhaps especially - one of human delight. A mob is a mob, and it might be the Mardi Gras mob rather than the post-game mob or the lynch mob that rolls over you like a juggernaut of joy.
Carmi's usual approach tends to the dour, the brooding, the momentous and the memorial. She muses constantly on the fate, and the many missteps, of humanity, and does so in relatively austere formal terms, right down to a sere palette of blacks, browns, and fiery reds. Blue, green, turquoise, and even warm orange normally occur in Carmi's paintings as highlights, cool spices in a heated landscape of anguish, alarm, and highly tentative hope. Carmi rarely lets herself party like this. But after several years furiously arguing with God, man, and fate - an argument that still continues in ongoing series like "Les Voix du Silence" - the artist has allowed herself a little dessert, a touch of artistic R&R. Her visit last spring to her grandchildren back in Israel gave her license to return to her skills as a colorist, skills she has suppressed for practically her whole career in California. Returning to such sensuousness in the "Carnaval" paintings, Carmi has finally found the other side of her diamond - the side that doesn't cut as deeply, but that flashes brilliantly.
Peter Frank
Los Angeles
July 2006
The human condition is not simply a favored subject of the modern artist, it is a preoccupation. Whether it is the turbulent passage of life, its inevitable (or at least poignant) tragedy, or the triumph that lies beyond - in the survival of the human spirit or the endurance of the species - artists in all disciplines, as spirited members of that species, speak invariably to the condition they share with their fellow homo sapiens. Across several decades and two continents, Rhea Carmi has spoken directly and consistently to the human condition. Her unabashed address to the passion and anguish her species knows can seem almost embarrassing in the rawness of its symbols and its textures. But Carmi mitigates this rough edge with an often-disarming elegance of means, a formal grace and coloristic charm that reformulate, but finally mirror, the beauty of the world around us. However nasty, brutish, and short our time on earth may be, Carmi reflects, joy and wonder can ease that fearsome ride.
Carmi has focused on the human condition in three ongoing parallel series of paintings. Interestingly, a great deal of stylistic variation maintains within each series - more, perhaps, than even maintains between the three. This is partly a result of the three series enduring in Carmi's practice and engaging her concentration for so long a time; over the decade or more she has "fed" the three strains, she has thought and re-thought, worked and re-worked her approach(es) to the intricate act of inventing and elaborating upon visual metaphors. But we can also justify what might seem inconsistent formal language within each series as an expression of the discontinuity that pertains in the human condition. Thus, the many explorations of passion and upheaval, adversity and triumph, that comprise "Humanity's Struggles," while generally more elaborate and tensile, seem ultimately no more imposing or conflicted than do the superficially more placid formulations of "Humanity's Resilience" or "Everlasting Spirit." The sense of graceful, serene unity we might expect to find predominating the latter series is not foreign to the other two; and the monumentality particular to "Humanity's Resilience," as inferred by the series title, can be seen throughout the three groups. It is possible to generalize about characteristics unique to each group, but the generalizations stick poorly if at all. Carmi reserves for herself the right and ability to bespeak all aspects of life, in all phases of her work.
An exhibition of works from one series, then, can display the exciting variety we might expect in a selection made from several series. But, as this exhibition of works from the "Humanity's Struggles" series demonstrates, the variety is not so great as to belie the consistency of the artist's sensibility. Throughout, Carmi evinces an emotional sensitivity to color and to gesture, a markedly sensual approach to texture, and the kind of refined expressivity in her line that we associate more with a calligrapher than with a painter. (The appearance of writing, in Hebrew and Latin letters, in certain of her paintings makes obvious this particular gift.) The selection of "Humanity's Struggles" paintings presented here is designed to bring forth these strengths, but is also configured to exemplify the series' consistency within its variety - or, no less, the variety within its consistency. The selection does not so much put Carmi's best foot forward as it typifies her step.
As a colorist, Carmi in effect summarizes her geographic biography. Her palette grounds itself in the earthy tones of her native Israel and her current home in the hills above Los Angeles, and is spiced with rich reds, brilliant yellows, marine blues, and greens both verdant and metallic - reflecting the plant life of the modern oases she inhabits and also the copper of the ancient Levantine and the lapis of the pre-colonial Southwest. On a (yet) more subjective level, colors for Carmi symbolize, or even embody, emotions and emotional responses. No work exemplifies this more clearly than Humanity's Struggles X (Twin Collapse). As the subtitle indicates, this painting refers to the destruction of New York's World Trade Center. The image, irregular vertical columns spotted with small black vertical lines, crudely evokes tall buildings in a state of dissolution. The fearsome momentousness of the event is conveyed not by the composition itself, which serves simply as a cipher for our orientation, but by the deep red that pervades, even covers, everything. This is the red of fear, anger, and catastrophe, the blood red of war. At the same time, its purity and its dominance invests the red with an irresistible sublimity, a kind of perfection or at least thoroughness that encompasses every aspect of our awareness.
If color thus embodies the impulse of perception for Carmi, line for her embodies the basic coherence of life - not just the structure, but the pulse of life's meaning, its logic (however opaque), its spiritual as well as physical skeleton. Her engagement with language and writing makes self-evident Carmi's dependence on line; but line-based imagery, even free of verbal notation, appears constantly throughout her oeuvre. Streaks, stripes, and the vertical (and horizontal) edges of rectangular forms comprise rhythmic networks whose architectonics are equally capable of fluidity and rigidity. In the latter mode they can prove binding and restrictive, as in Humanity's Struggles XXI (Imprisoned), or somber and mournful, as in Humanity's Struggles I (Shattered Red Cross). In the former mode, as seen in Humanity's Struggles XXIV, the whole image fairly dances into visual space. Humanity's Struggles XXIII (Homage to Lost Astronauts) fuses the two modes, posing a gaunt black ideogram upon a brilliant red platform all set against a field of deep aqua. That ideogram at once connotes the astronauts themselves, their spaceship, and their ultimate destiny; inscribed on an endless sea, it is a voice clamoring, mournfully, in the wilderness of the universe.
Such an existential gesture, a positing of the human against the void, suits Rhea Carmi's style, inheriting as it does the beauteous, passionate gesturality of mid-century European art informel and its reinterpretation into calligraphically impelled abstraction by Israeli (and other mid-Eastern) artists of that time. Carmi insists that the tragicomedy of life is as elegant and tumultuous now as it was in 1950, that we still live with the constant threat of annihilation, and that the human spirit cannot and will not be stifled by that threat. Simple or complex, agitated or calm, but always poised and luminous, the paintings comprising the "Humanity's Struggles" series argue that, even in the face of death, humanity triumphs.
Peter Frank
Los Angeles
April 2005
