Exploring the infinite possibilities of colors and abstraction, Camille Ver’s oeuvre visually expresses the joy she finds in the richness and complexity of a transcendent belief. Driven by her own child-like curiosities, Ver has harmoniously combined elements to build a structure celebrating the wonder she perceives.
Intuitively created, Ver’s abstract work is anchored in reality while showing the mysterious depths contained in faith. Her latest exhibit titled “A Love that Saved Me”, engages in a wide range of sentiments that addresses questions of human value, dignity, and salvation.
The artworks exhibited are visual translations of natural structures and their relationship with the divine. The organic shapes reflect the nature of Our Creator, whether its appearance is bold and evident or hazy and faint, they endure– a reminder of His omnipresence.
Elements inspired by art movements such as French Rococo, Neoclassicism, and Romanticism are composed in a montage to create visual puzzles. Concealed in the layers of paint, using Ver’s favorite colors of Blonde, Isabelline, Whitewash, Saffron, and Aquamarine — among the 75, more or less, in her palette — metaphors and associations abound, laying out narratives with multiple sentiments developed since her childhood.
The exhibit focuses on the artist’s rediscovered connection between art & devotion. “From then to now, that love isn’t any more just a feeling but a relationship being nurtured as I got to know Him more… and my relationship with color, I can say, is the same.” Camille Ver narrates. Ver explores the spiritual experience translated through a work of art, and how painting can be considered a practice of healing and emancipation. While her work explores hope, light, and transcendence, it also exposes and convicts one’s innermost thoughts and feelings– of coping with grief, fighting the mundane, battling the absurd, dodging the obscene, and confronting the fragments between damnation and salvation.
Camille Ver (b.1980) is one of the Philippines’ flag-bearers in contemporary abstractionism, creating landscapes through combinations of observation, imagination and memory fragments. Ver took up painting at the University of the Philippines’ College of Fine Arts in 1998 followed by a special course in Interior Design at the Philippine Institute of Interior Design. With more than 10 solo and countless group exhibits, Camille Ver still continues to reimagine and rediscover what is known and seen through her vivid compositions. Her landscapes amplify the shapes found in nature through color, movement, and line, incorporating an expressionistic edge that often moves into abstraction. The result is an astonishingly varied body of work that skillfully blends the viewpoints of both genres.
“A Love that Saved Me” by Camille Ver will be on view from July 10 to 19, 2021. Galerie Joaquin U.P. Town Center is located at 2/F Phase 2 U.P. Town Center, Katipunan Ave., Diliman, Quezon City.
