Art Verité Gallery

In “Existence,” Noel Elicana continues to question the essence of humanity and what makes us human. The exhibition is a follow-up to his exhibition “Concrete Cross,” where he contemplated faith. Elicana continues to philosophize through his paintings, attempting to dissect our “being” into three components: physical, mental, and spiritual.

Using the planes in his paintings, Elicana divides the foreground and background with a metaphorical horizon. Usually, the foregrounds are remains and rubble of structures, some concrete and some organic. This is the artist’s way of acknowledging the failures and hardships that have tested humanity’s mental fortitude.

Above the horizon, Elicana fills the canvas with more of his personal symbols, such as moths for his loved ones, ants for his hardworking parents, and heavy equipment for labor. These symbols represent the positive and negative aspects of the human experience that feed the spirit. Faith is central to the artist’s life and art, and he visualizes his belief in its protection through the many carefully drawn nests in his paintings.

Regardless of the painting’s size, Elicana’s surreal landscapes are both meticulous and spontaneous. His creative process begins with an idea, and he then directly paints the first layer on the canvas. The rest of the “stories” come to him fragment by fragment, needing more layers each time. He painstakingly makes sense of life’s construction and reconstruction through the way he chooses the objects in each of the images. Similarly painstaking is how he tries to give his subjects life-like movements through texture and gestural brushstrokes.

The painting “Endures”, depicts a man surrounded by trees, with a heart in his chest, and withered roots for his limbs. Elicana paints the physical as it is attached to nature. Being human is being confronted by the nature of the body, in both its strength and fragility.

The artworks in “Existence” are a reminder of our complex nature. Above the rubble of our past lie the things we hold dear, the things that propel us forward. Elicana invites us to reflect on our being, to ponder the question that echoes through his work: what are we made of?

Written by Allyn Canja