A special fundraising exhibition of new works by abstractionist Camille Ver opened at Galerie Stephanie last Aug. 27.
Known for her use of the urban and the built environment as the foundation of her visual arts practice, Ver’s works show abstractions of cityscapes, skyscraper, blueprints and other urban scenes. The experience of pure verve is captured in compositional abstractions, not unlike Rothko’s modernist forays into the multi-forms.
The exhibition, aptly called “Rebuild,” seeks to raise funds for the treatment of the artist’s father, Francis Ver, who is currently battling cancer.
Ver’s reference point is the abstracted aesthetics of a large metropolis. Without depicting a specific place, Ver’s oeuvre represents an archetype of cityscapes—the goal being to reconstruct the emotional character of urban locations. Ver achieves this through a broad composition in acrylic, which is then layered with lines drawn in with a Tec pen, bringing detail and order to an otherwise blurred form. Her newer works use both black and white lines, which represent the hard lines of an actual cityscape—created in part by a mixture of power cables, laundry lines, telephone poles, and the steel bars of a construction site.
Camille Ver studied at the College of Fine Arts of University of the Philippines in Diliman. The artist avoids the common use of minimalism in abstraction, preferring large swaths of palette knife strokes and experimentations in color in her practice.