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52. RAFAEL WARDI Paintings from the 1980's,
15 June - 30 September 1990
In the summer of 1990 the whole upper floor of the Sara
Hildén Art Museum was reserved for the exhibition that presented
Rafael Wardi's (b. 1928 Helsinki) most recent paintings from the 1980's.
Additional material was exhibited on the lower floor of the museum, such
as photographs, textiles, postcards and books, etc. This pedagogic section
gave the public an opportunity to get acquainted with the world that had
been the basis and inspiration for Rafael Wardi's paintings.
The museum staff had also assembled a 30-minute video
about the artist and his working methods.
From the very beginning, Wardi's motifs have included
still lifes, interiors, compositions with people, nudes and landscapes.
Although Wardi was also interested in the potential of modern art at the
beginning of the 1950's, his best motifs have been realistically rendered
compositions that portray his own surroundings intimately and
enthusiastically.
Rafael Wardi has limited his colours to pure yellow, red,
green and blue shades. The influence of his teachers is clearly evident
as well as his continuing interest in the works of Bonnard, Munch and
van Gogh.
In Wardi's early paintings the colours were often placed
on the canvas in small, comparatively thin and irregular patches and
spots,
which partly overlapped each other and which mixed optically to create
an illusion of flickering light and the disintegration of form in the
glow of coloured light. The colours of the exhibited new paintings were
somewhat more concrete: colours were spread very thickly, and the contrasts
were stronger.
The colour yellow is still the most dominant feature in
Wardi's paintings. However, the new paintings emphasize even stronger
the fact that Wardi does not only illustrate the leisure-free moods of
bright summer afternoons. The basic issues are deeper than that. Wardi's
conception of painting is free association on many different levels; it
includes facts, feelings, objects, art-historic memories, personal experiences
and technical solutions. And, as the artist himself has said, the most
beautiful and vibrant yellow comes from a moment of deep depression. The
association of the new colour symbols of Wardi's latest works with the
inner meanings of his paintings provide us with perspectives which retroactively
also shed light on his earlier paintings.
Catalogue:
Rafael Wardi
1990, 64 pages
Sara Hildén Art Museum Publication 41 (Text in Finnish and
English)
ISSN 0357-3001
Price FIM 25
24,786 visitors attended the exhibition.
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