To be honest, I had never heard anything about Guy Warren before arriving in Australia. I was searching for galleries on the internet to feed my artistic appetite, to look for new ideas, or, to put it simply, just because I love art, as an artist but also as a spectator.
There was this exhibition at the S. H. Ervin Gallery in Sydney and I just had a look at some of Guy Warren’s paintings on the Web and was really interested in the variety of works and techniques he had explored in his life. So I was delighted to see, on May 29th, the exhibition called Genesis of a painter: Guy Warren at 95, covering the entire career, the entire life of this artist, through many different artworks, from realistic figurative portraits to recent sharp drawings and paintings.
I was especially interested in the bigger acrylic and oil paintings, of course, and the more abstract ones, the ones that show multiple layers. I have been staring at some of the paintings for long moments, traveling in the transparency of the paint, between the many layers, that were sometimes diluted and fragile, with shapes reminiscent of flames or leaves, as if the material had been folded, and others that were bright and rough. You could really feel the vivacious gesture in the final artwork, but also a deep complexity. Finally, and this is an important dimension for me, you could definitely see the artist’s presence in the brushstrokes, his passion and his pleasure.
