LIFE AS A POEM
Cista Arts Galleries, London UK
“Life As A Poem”
Cista Arts Gallery Online Exhibition and Magazine, London, UK
(September 7th – 30th, 2022)
The search for life's meaning has produced much philosophical, scientific, theological, and metaphysical speculation throughout history. Different people and cultures believe different things for the answer to this question. A poem is a piece of writing in which the expression of feelings and ideas. We welcome artists of all mediums and from all countries to depict their thoughts on this theme ‘Life as a poem.' All artists with a different artistic approach reflected their individual and exceptional experience around the theme ‘life as a poem.’
These drawings focus on the human figure through successive phases of gesture. Rather than relying on facial identification, I construct narrative through physical language—the expansion and contraction, tension and release, and multiple interactions inherent in the body. Gesture becomes a means of communicating experiences that cannot necessarily be expressed through facial expression or words. The poses and lighting alternate between suggesting movement and absolute stillness, creating a suspended sense of time in which the body appears caught between action and pause.
The emphasis on difficult and often psychologically charged postures, rendered through dramatic chiaroscuro, deliberately exaggerates shapes and proportions to create a heightened sense of tension and anxiety within the work. In Anguish (2021), for example, the compressed and contorted posture transforms the body into an expression of an internal state, allowing physical form to become a vehicle for psychological experience. The figures are not intended as portraits of specific individuals; instead, their stories emerge through gesture, posture, distortion, and the relationship between the body and its surrounding space.
The works vary in scale and perspective, moving between complete figures and extreme, cropped sections of the body. This shifting viewpoint fragments the figure and encourages the viewer to encounter the body as both a whole and a collection of isolated physical experiences. The restricted palette of black and white further intensifies this tension. The deep black of the charcoal evokes the psychological darkness associated with experiences such as anger, depression, isolation, uncertainty, and emotional distress, while the white of the paper introduces a contrasting sense of openness, space, and possibility. Rather than functioning simply as opposites, black and white become interconnected states through which darkness and hope can coexist.
The works are intentionally confrontational, bringing internal struggles and often unspoken thoughts to the surface through the physical presence of the body. The human figure carries memories, history, and identity through its skin, yet each figure’s particular story is communicated through physical language rather than personal identification. The body becomes both subject and psychological space: a visible vessel through which invisible experiences are made tangible.
Charcoal is ideally suited to this approach because of its transient physicality. Its capacity to be drawn, erased, blurred, displaced, and redrawn reflects the instability of movement, change, and non-permanent transformation. The medium also carries a sense of process and history within itself. Every mark, erasure, blur, and overlap remains part of the drawing’s development, allowing the surface to retain traces of what has been altered or removed. In this sense, charcoal parallels the body itself: both accumulate traces of experience, retain evidence of what has preceded them, and continually exist between states of permanence and change.
