Page 178 - Genius

raFat

Along with an unerring eye for what makes
a picture succeed in strictly formal terms,
Mey has a masterly way with imagistic
metamorphosis, as seen in his painting
"Embrace," where the piece dc resistance is
a woman's head that becomes a vase, with
fronds spilling out of it that also serve as her
hair. This could sound like an awkward image
to carry off, and indeed it would be in the
hands of an artist with less defined graphic
shorthand. Mey, however, makes such images
succeed by virtue of his superb draftsmanship
and a style that reduces his subjects to their
most vital components.
In this regard, his most immediate artistic
ancestor is victor brauner, the romanian
painter who emigrated to France and became
prominent in the Surrealist movement. like
brauner Mey has evolved a style at once
precise and flexible that enables him to explore
a seemingly limitless range of figurative
transformations, suggesting all manner of
poetic and psychological meanings.
In Mey's "birth of venus," the lower portion of a
shapely female nude emerges from a sea shell
that fills the upper part of the composition like
an Art deco arabesque. like all of the paintings
in the series shown at Montserrat gallery,
the image is painted in a linear manner on a
black background, which lends the picture a
dynamic glow akin to neon lights emerging
from darkness. The shell is a luminous green
hue and curves around a brilliant red orb at its
top, while the feminine form emerging from its
bottom is pure white. The picture presents a
precise formal distillation of a subject that has
preoccupied certain painters throughout art
history. Mey's version is so succinct that he
almost appears to be having the last word.
A certain playfulness permeates all of rafat
Mey's paintings, as seen in "Nude Flying Over
Clouds," where the female figure has an classic
quality not unlike a wavering, wind-blown flag
as she sails through the sky, her hair flowing
behind her, her breasts flopping down over the
small cumulus formations that float below. One
could read all manner of possible meanings
into such an image, but for Mey it would seem
sufficient simply to create it and leave the
viewer to draw his or her own conclusions.
Other large paintings, such as The Woman
with long Hair," delight us with their dazzling
figurative distortions. Here, the woman's
feature's play a game of peek-a-boo with the
viewer, half-hidden among layered forms and
 HomaGe a maGritte, 1998 MIxED MEDIA 40x27 IN. / 100x70 CM.
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