Art Critics

Sirenes has received great art critics and reviews for her artwork & exhibitions all over the world

 

 

Viviana Puello

Editor in Chief            ArtTour International Magazine - 2015

Color Encountering Luminosity

“Her art has been previously described as embodying abstract expressionism and lyrical abstraction. I would add to this that, beyond any discipline, Sirenes’s works are brilliant examples of artistry performed by a very elevated and sensitive soul.

Working in acrylics on canvas, her abstract expressionistic works reflect a perfect balance of harmony, intensity, and spontaneity. She does this by producing eccentric and shifting pieces that seem consolidated yet still impartially abstract. Her talent lies in her uncanny ability to use color so purposefully that her works seem to fuse the artistic imagination with the physical. Her art expresses a connection with nature that can only be achieved through introspection, with each image focusing on inner growth based on her continuous pursuit of spirituality.

Combining mystery and simplicity, each of Sirenes’ paintings glows with bright energy, almost inviting us to reach a state of bliss. Her contemplative and meditative works seem to portray inner landscapes, pulling the viewer into an active experience. Conjuring emotions with energetic colors yet remaining amiable, Sirenes is able to depict her inner awareness of life through a deep understanding of the effects of color and light. Her compositions remain gentle even though each canvas seems to be awash with dynamism.

Drawing inspiration from nature through yoga and meditation, Sirenes paints directly onto the canvas with the frequent use of finger-painting. As she has declared, she paints “always barefoot,” an act that reveals the inner intention of the artist to stay in touch with nature and the outside world, intuitively following the need to become one with the whole. The result are unique pieces with delightful and vibrant color combinations and a mystical sensibility.

Creating works with this divine inspiration in mind, the artist seems to tap into universal inner forces that enable her art to radiate a revitalizing sense of peace, stability, happiness, and playfulness. Combining elements of nature and the metaphysical, her works are enriching and enduring. It is Sirenes’s almost magical talent with color that ultimately elevates.”

http://www.vividartsnetwork.com/sirenes.html
 Art Critic of Sirenes by, Wilson Wong, of her first exhibition at Agora Gallery New York - autumn 2013

Sirenes: A Sublime Colorist Enamored of Light

As a little girl in kindergarten in Norway the artist known as Sirenes was fascinated with color. She loved the tactile sensation of putting her fingers in paint and applying it directly to the paper. And to this very day many of her large canvases are created entirely by finger-painting. These paintings in particular have a smoothness and a lyricism that is always a distinctive feature of her work, but can be seen to special advantage in the intriguingly titled acrylic on canvas,“The Man Who Disappears,” in which the softly caressed pigment, with its subtle tonal variations of earth tones resembles something more like an amorphous mist of light and shadow than a physical surface: an atmospheric miasma conjured with a finesse that calls to mind the 19th century British painter John Constable’s comment about his great colleague and fellow countryman J.M.W. Turner, of whom he once said, “Turner seems to have outdone himself; now he’s painting with tinted steam!”


Just as mysteriously allusive in another manner, exemplifying the unique combination of coloristic sensitivity and gestural vivacity that Sirenes brings to bear is a composition she calls “The Fairy.” With a starburst composition akin to the West Coast American painter Jay DeFeo’s legendary canvas “The Rose,” albeit with that artist’s thick oil impasto replaced by Sirenes’ smoothly luminous light blue hues heightened with streaks of pearly white, without resorting to figurative imagery the painting evokes the fanciful spirit of a numinous being.


In another large acrylic on canvas called “Joy,” Sirenes conveys an even more elusive subject by virtue of her mastery of chromatic dynamics as vibrant and yet gentle as the music of Ravel. Here, delicately blended and variegated yellows, oranges, reds and pinks, accented with just a few steaks of verdant green, evoke a buoyant sense of the emotion that the title describes. Indeed, with these colors delicately balance at the center of the composition, floating against a beige background suggesting the raw unprimed linen of the canvas itself, Sirenes appears to combine a gestural lyricism that can be compared favorably to the early Abstract Expressionist works of Philip Guston with a chromatic complexity that would do the Color Field master Jules Olitski proud. Her ability to combine these elements so successfully suggests that one might think of her as an “Abstract Impressionist” who often goes beyond the Impressionist goal of painting the effect of light on objects to make the light itself the pi�ce de resistance of her compositions. On the other hand, being a postmodern painter with all the license for free expression which that term implies, she does not hesitate to introduce recognizable subject matter when moved by the desire to do so.


One such work is her acrylic on canvas, “Lake at Night,” in which the white flowers and green leaves on the surface of the blue water appear to pay tribute to Monet, but the sense of their being illuminated by rays from the moon rather than the sun lends the composition a more romantic quality in the manner of Symbolism.


It should be added, however, that here, as well as in other paintings with prominently allusive elements –– such as “Butterfly Over Water” and “Evening” –– it is the underlying abstract armature of formal balance informing her compositions that invariably enhances and empowers all of Sirenes’ paintings.
 

http://www.agora-gallery.com/ArtistReview/Sirenes.aspx
Art Critic of Sirenes first exhibition at Galleria Wikiarte, Bologna Italy, by curator Denitza Nedkova, 2013

The irregular story

The motivations forbeing creative are always multiple, the reasons for each action are the result of a mixture of conscious stimuli and impulses. Art, therefore, is the best field for such moral ambiguity not only in terms of representation, but also in the execution and in its reasons. It is precisely the motions to carry out the work of Sirenes, the artist of the unique style for everything, who shows how the point of encounter with the reality, with the actuality is that of action, of the production.

The artist understands that to be a contemporary artist must first be contemporary woman, aware of the casualness of the unpredictable life and of the freedom as being, without the commitment, now overwhelmed, for the fighting emancipation. Thetonal painting, rich of color and motion, is all played on the constant intent to remain in close contact with the outside, while using an intimate and not phenomenal work. The big idea of the painter, the one that makes it original, is in the courage to realize the extrinsic with the intrinsic, escaping from the respectability of the real vision of the things. If art by definition establishes an ideal or craft comparison with reality, the artist, is always free to decide its attachment to both the first (art) than the second (the reality).

In fact Sirenes do not believes in the need to establish a characteristic creative attitude, but rather chooses a non-linear and abstract path, but always sensitive and "disturbed" from the outside. So begins the way of the irregular art of Sirenes.

The obviousnegation of form is discredited by a cromia rich of hues and not always of colors, which realizes a language of intrusive volumes , often well defined, that sometimes "have fun" to take a recognizable appearance and to contract itself in restraining lines. But these drawings of figures and things are deceptive because the limiting traits are unstable and they quickly dissolve in the dense mass of colors.

The artist shapes the pasta with their hands certainly to emphasize her close relationship with painting, but mainly because no other instrument is suitable to realize her inspirational motions. The formal dissolution leads to inferaniconic and tachisme influences, determined by strong and sensual expressiveness, by progressive abstraction of the poetic language, by an excessive materialization of color tearing the surface of the painting.

Formally these characteristics are recognized in the art of Sirenes, but they are less relevant, because the matrix of a dramatic informal intellectual crisis is replaced by a more sentimental, almost lyric ideological model, which determines an inconstant and variable trend of the representation. Therefore It seems appropriate to define this modus operandi as Lyrical Abstraction, able to combine the personal universe with the real world without the seemingly and imposed abstraction from the phenomenal.

The expressive an symbolic function of the color is accompanied by its primary function of connective link between spirit, a work of art and nature. The canvas is transformed, in the words of Kandinsky, in Impression, where in the work is still visible the personal and direct impression of the external nature.

But do not forget that the psychic and the physical effect of nuances are reconciled by the action and, therefore, by the emotion, that takes shape in the hands of the inspired, the one that can tell the story irregular harmoniously.

http://www.wikiarte.com/artista.php?id=128
August 2013 - Sirenes is being interviewed in the New York based artblog Artograma by Gigi - Thanks Gigi  "You may be prone to respond to her work as abstract expressionism but if there were a more fitting category for this Norwegian painter, it would have been her Intuitive Expressionism. She says that meditation and yoga help her find guidance."

http://artograma.com

Art Critic from Salvatore Russo of Sirenes artwork in the Interationoal Contemporary Artbook "Segnalati 2013 - published in Brüssels May 4th 2013 - Thanks Salvatore "Softharmonies, navigate the ocean of color. Fires burn in the Styx of thoughts, only to be ferried by Charon, and find the right path. Light trails cross the threshold prohibited. The compositions of visual Sirenes lead us to make this trip immaterial between that and whispered. Lead us to analyze a world based on the dichotomy dark / light. Real dances of light make their appearance on the canvas. The dark, with its endless shadows, we show our eyes. The painting de Sirenes and a painting that reworks the dictates of a very creative psyche and we reported the synthesis of signs through a highly chromatic language learned. A contemporary language, destined to remain in the most important art history books."
Press release from Agora Gallery July 23 - August 13, 2013Reception: Thursday July 25, 2013 6-8 PM - Thanks Angelina "For Norwegian artist Sirenes, painting is a visceral undertaking, one that represents an organic connection between painter and canvas. Often foregoing the use of even a brush as an intermediary, she will apply her paints with her fingers, creating what she calls “abstract expressions on the canvas.” The artist loved painting with her hands when she was a child, and there are appealing echoes of a childlike openness in her work. But that freedom comes hand in hand with a well-developed sense of composition, as well as an ability to use color for maximum impact.

“I have always been fascinated by colors,” says Sirenes. Using acrylics, she works with a palette that takes advantage of the saturated shades that acrylics offer. That palette is employed in a wide variety of ways, from images that work through the subtle variations of one shade to others that juxtapose a near-kaleidoscopic array of hues. “I am trying to express my inner feelings,” Sirenes explains, and, indeed, her open-handed style brings those feelings vividly to life"

April 27 - May 9th, 2013 - Exhibition "Oltre" - Galleria Wikiarte, Bologna, Italy - Together with 15 other selected international artists  Thank you for the Art Critic from Denitza Nedkova - "A sense of liberation from all dogma, limit, formalities invades us observing the works of Sirenes, Francesco Sandrelli and Mark Randazzo. These creatives choose to leave out the form, that sets naturally or artificially, to follow the music of colors, the dance of gestures, the purity of meditation and create art that leads to reflection and rediscovery of self.
05.01.2013  Debbie Chapman, from UK started her artblog with an introduction of Sirenes - Thanks Debbie! "And I’ll end this first post with an artist whose work I have only recently stumbled upon – Norwegian finger-painter Sirenes. Her work is dreamy and enchanting, with a stunning palette (that puts mine to shame – must work on this!) and confident, exciting brushstrokes. Her compositions are seriously fantastic, and from the looks of it she has totally mastered the art of ‘knowing when to stop’. 

I want to say the first of these two paintings reminds me of a Boccioni, but his colours were nearly all bright, right? So who would you say is the biggest influence on this painting, if you had to guess? I can see aspects of Cubism and Orphism, but again the colours are too muted for a Delaunay-style piece, and it’s far too abstract for a Braques-style piece… Any help here would be appreciated! All I know is that I love it, and I’m totally inspired to go and pick up my tubes of acrylic and start pushing some paint around on a big canvas right now…"