| About the Exhibition
Opening reception: First Friday, April 2, 5 - 9 pm
Meet the Artist: Saturday, April 24, 1 - 4 pm; gallery talk
at 2 pm
Cerulean Arts is pleased to present Shadows & Veils
featuring two series of paintings by artist Kassem Amoudi.
Amoudi's art is a distillation of his life's journey both
as an artist and as a seeker of truth and beauty. His work
straddles a thin line between form and formlessness, positive
and negative space, the dynamic and the static, action and
stillness. For Amoudi, true beauty lies beyond form and nature.
It may be hidden in a slight hint of color at the edge of
the canvas or it may become the main attraction. Amoudi listens
and responds to his paintings as if they were living beings,
allowing them to assume the form for which they were meant.
In the Veils series of small color field paintings,
layers of color mask other colors or actions which have come
before. We see the shallow space between these layers, creating
a lyric sensation of time passing from past to present. In
stark contrast, the negative space within Shadows
represent human figures -- those whose existence we acknowledge
but do not see. They are the unfortunates who exist behind
walls of prisons, beaten and tortured because they had been
at the wrong place at the wrong time, or forgotten people,
the suffering and the homeless, passed by and ignored as if
they do not exist.
Kassem Amoudi is a graduate of Helwan University in Cairo,
Egypt, and received his MFA at the Pennsylvania Academy of
the Fine Arts. An award-winning painter with an extensive
exhibition record, Amoudi is an adjunct faculty member at
PAFA and faculty-in-residence in the MFA program at Vermont
College/Union Institute and University.
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