Michael Elion

THE UNIVERSE, LIFE, DEATH, TIME AND ETERNITY – THE COSMIC PAINTINGS OF MICHAEL ELION.

Michael Elion holds degrees in architecture from the University Cape Town (UCT) and the Architectural Association (AA) in London. During his architectural studies he worked for internationally renowned architects; Daniel Libeskind in Berlin and Massimiliano Fuksas in Rome. Following his architectural degrees, he moved to Paris for six years where he received a Master’s in Philosophy (aesthetics) and worked for contemporary artists Xavier Veilhan and Pierre Huyghe. His large-scale public artworks are testament these experiences at the intersection of art, architecture and our perception & experience of public space.

A confirmed avant-gardist he designed an enormous pink halo which floated in the night sky high above a large public square at The French National Archives in Paris, hallowing the French capital. Another tour de force was Armchair, a series of gigantic, interconnected chairs installed in high profile locations across London; towering over the statue at Picadilly Circus, arching over roads in Birck Lane and Convent Garden and in the forecourts of Tate Modern and The Royal Exchange. His architectural scale public sculptures are remarkable in both their technical expertise and their re-imagination of our experience of public space.

On his return to South Africa he created “Perceiving Freedom” the giant spectacles on Sea Point promenade gazing in the direction of Robben Island where Nelson Mandela endured his long incarceration. “Perceiving Freedom” has a historic dimension as a reminder of South Africa’s troubled past. Another embellishment he added to the Atlantic coast, “I Love You!” is the large stainless steel heart decorated with crystals hanging between palm trees along the Camps Bay promenade. Both of these sculptures have become iconic elements of the Atlantic coastal landscape and veritable tourist attractions.

When one thinks of most the great abstract artists – Rothko, Pollock, Henry Moore and Brancusi – it would seem that, after a period of experiment, they settled down and produced mature work which was all in the same immediately recognizable idiom. This does not apply to Michael Elion, an eclectic wedded to experiment in a wide variety of different media. His paintings too are not all of a piece: they vary astonishingly in concept and style, but there are three constants that unite nearly all of them - dazzling richness of color, an emphasis on the liquidity of pigment and a Romantic disdain of the classical qualities of stability, symmetry and balance.

One main stream of inspiration seen to perfection in “Emergence Trapped in Time” consists of abstract configurations located at the center of the canvas surrounded by broad margins of empty space. These allow them to breathe, and so faint, vaporous and nigh invisible are the outer edges of the painting that they barely exist, allowing the motif to expand and contract. Paintings such as “Emergence” are so slight, light, airy and buoyant they seem weightless and immaterial and they hover or float as if composed of tinted helium. The roundish image in “Emergence” consists of beautiful, thin, wispy veils of transparent pigment – gold, pink, cerise and blue – applied one on top of the other. One gazes through the blues to see the pinks and golds, but this transparency vanishes towards the center where the more thickly applied layers of gold allow of no see through. Near the center an amorphous segment of unprimed canvas echoes the surround of the painting, and emphasizes that, despite the layering which suggests recession, the work is a flat piece of canvas.

Around the perimeter the pigments still seem liquid as if the artist’s brush had just deposited them very thinly on the canvas. The colors run into each other changing their hues as they blend one into the other. The action of the brush creates trails of pigment and introduces circular movement into the ensemble, activating the image. “Emergence” seems unfinished. It is tentative and seems to describe a process rather than an end product. The thin swirls and mists of paint seem to be attempting to resolve themselves into a definitive statement, but they have yet to attain this. Nevertheless the painting is far from still-born. “Emergence” is all mutating colors, shapes, mobility and flux – a work of ethereal delicacy and extreme refinement.

The glory of color erupts even more forcibly from “Surrender to Growth” where the shimmering golds and reds are far more keyed up than they are in “Emergence”. Deep blues that almost verge on black, lend solidity and weight to the base of the image, although a more feathery touch prevails above. A bravura passage of color occurs in the flame reds set among golds on the left hand side. Once again gravity is absent and “Surrender” is again suspended in mid-air. Growth is suggested by the way in which the different colors accrete to each other, and seem to swell outwards particularly at the summit of the painting. The same billowing effect occurs at the top of “Hidden Meanings”.  All the paintings like the “Our Desire for Gentleness” appear alive. The ravishing pinks and blues seem caught in the process of materializing and dematerializing as we can see at the base to right where the pigment seems to evaporate or dissolve into thin air leaving thin linear squiggles in its wake as it disappears. Such creations suggest an event rather than a finished painting, and seem to describe the interaction between various colored gases trapped in a bell jar.

All Michael’s major works – “All Beautiful Memories will disappear”, “Dreams of the Artist” and “The Delicate Forces that Guide Creation” - are composed in exactly the same colors applied in exactly the same manner. The only difference is that color occupies the entire picture space so that their chromatic impact is greatly enhanced. None are inert. They are praxis rather than stasis and evoke a continuous cycle of action and change whereby the colors react to each other, mutate and constantly metamorphose in hue. All this action gives works like “The Delicate Forces” dynamism and excitement for the painting consists of shifting splashes and washes of luminous color that invade each other and battle for supremacy.

In “All the Beautiful Memories” it is difficult to discern what is appearing and what is disappearing. The waiving undulant forms of the blues and pinks descend in a wavy motion from a nexus of gold and cerise and then burst into a pyrotechnic shower of gold. A scythe-like maroon form cuts into it, so it fades and blends into the darker colors around it, creating a slight turbulence. The movement of the swathes of color create movement, but this movement is a kind of slow motion in which one color very gradually infiltrates and blends into another as the pinks and blues react to each other on the right hand side of the canvas. The action is as gentle and soothing as beautiful memories. The prevalence of dusky blues and pinks and the gold of the sun suggest that sky, cloud, sunsets and sunrises seem to be basis of Michael’s inspiration, and indeed much of his work such as this and “All the Beautiful Memories” resonate a Turneresque cosmic grandeur. In this wonderland of radiant color and sparkling light all the blushes of color that fade and dissolve only to reassert themselves and intensify suggest the pulse of the universe and, by extension, that of mankind.

“Forms of Power and Control” comes as a shock to the system. Solid, weighty, massive and monumental, it boldly stands its ground, and confronts the viewer with a radical Malevichian all black painting. A bold broad red stripe runs across it and seems to move forward to bar our entry and signal danger. A pitch black square with scalloped edges emerges from the somewhat lighter black background and almost occupies the whole of it. On it there is something that looks like a mask with a suggestion of nose and eyes surveying us in the most ominous fashion. Black and blood red are strongly emotive and here they not only conjure up thoughts of death and destruction, they also contrast with all the bright joyful colors we have seen in the earlier paintings.

“The Soul”, another baleful work, vaguely reminiscent of Georgia O’Keefe, is executed in eyrie greenish grey shades with golden highlights and a strong overall luminous glow. It delineates an animal skull in the process of decomposition, and the black seems to act like acid steadily nibbling away at the ossature. Whole areas have decayed, and there are apertures in the frail structure of bone which will soon crumble into dust. This is a Memento Mori, a reminder of death and decay, and what it depicts is not the soul but the detritus that is left when the soul departs.  The blacks in “Freedom in Death’s Release” suggest death, but the drifting color and its varying intensity, the movement of the brush and the continually shifting balance between opacity and transparency are alive and seem to promise some kind of resurrection.

“The Harmonious Co-Existence of Opposite States of Being” is two paintings in one. They can be conceived as Ying and Yang for the theme is balance, and though things may run out of kilter for a while, inevitably they will return to normal. It is a law of Nature. The works run into each other but their meeting point is harshly disjunctive emphasizing the disparities of color and insisting on the identity of the two paintings as polar opposites. The left and right of “The Harmonious Co-Existence” are similar in design but different in color. They seem to be inspired by the meandering intricacies of Italian marbled paper or perhaps cross-sections of rock where different strata of different hues have been compressed together in wavy layers under immense geological pressure over eons of time. Eons of time strikes an apt note upon which to conclude, for what is “Hidden Meanings” but a disquisition on the universe, nature, man, the soul, time and eternity.