SOPHIA ANGELIS
Why? Oil Pastel on Canvas 24”x 16”
W hen Sophia Angelis moved from Greece to Germany as a child, the movement was paralleled by a change in the es­sential shape of her consciousness. No wonder she is consumed by the idea of the ship; that temple of the voyaging soul that brings a person out and home again.
The ship, which longs to be untethered as the soul longs to be released from all that inhibit self actualization. It is natural that the ship, inexhaustible fountain of metaphor that it is, has been taken as talisman by an artist like Angelis, whose work is con­cerned with not only transition and transubstantiation, but with the idea of metaphor itself.
Angelis paints naturalistic images of marine life and nonrepre-sentational depictions of souls moving out of the body and pres­ents them as part of a unified project whose interconnections may nonetheless remain unclear. She rejects and refutes any obliga­tion to contain the various branches in discrete units. The very act of presenting such works side by side should be taken as a state­ment—one that implies, or rather takes as given, the fact that a connection exists between the physical world and the mental; that without landscape and commerce the concepts we use to describe our psyches to ourselves own would be fatally impoverished.
Angelis seeks to expose the disconnectedness and isola­tion of modern life while also, through landscape painting, to depict real beauty.
Circle of Life Oil & Collage on Canvas 39”x 28”
Her childhood move from Greece to Germany, from color and light to painful isolation, only goes partway towards explaining her compulsion to simultaneously assert that beauty exists and point a finger at life’s grave defects. The explanation lies more in what Angelis refers to as “The memory of death”---an intu­ition of human life’s essential fragility that was planted in her as a child by her mother’s illness. Revealing life as an essentially petty progression of vain pursuits, the Memory also heightens the ability to see beauty and to intimate the existence of a larger sphere in which universal values are possible. In this way, sorrow and fear have carved in her a larger living space for radical joy, for radical vision.
Website:http://www.angelisophia.com