Girls just wanna have fun
Nina Pandolfo’s alluring exhibition Feelings launched at Lazarides Gallery – By James Brewer
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, says Brazilian artist Nina Pandolfo, who is in town for her first London solo show, entitled Feelings. Nina wants to have fun with her work – at one time she coloured outdoor sites on a grand scale in sophisticated graffiti in her home city São Paulo – and she harks back to childhood in her love of soft and feminine textures.
Her large acrylic paintings, with their pinks and patterns, are superficially in a kind of bubble-gum world. They carry titles of wide-eyed innocence and abound in playful fabric motifs, but at the same time reflect the deep seriousness with which the child absorbs and experiments with their evolving environment.
My time to fly
The Rathbone Place gallery Lazarides is adorned until July 5 2012 with new work in self-taught Nina’s Spice Angels series. Gallery owner Steve Lazarides has a track record in picking winners: his first West End gallery, in Greek Street, brought the elusive British artist Banksy to prominence by selling his screenprints.
Nina is the youngest of five sisters, and this may explain her deep insight into the world of the little girl. Her characters are round-faced, sweet and innocent, on the cusp of adolescence, and never quite smiling. They are too busy discovering the delights of the chocolate box, trying on cute headgear, and even posing in burlesque corsets. Nina told us that her friends identify her with her subjects, and this is certainly true as far as their appealing, beautiful eyes are concerned
Satisfaction guaranteed
While the mind of the girl is symbolic of the woman, this applies to the male gender too, and all the characters in Nina’s work have their strong, individual personality. They have got beyond the stage where, as Nina puts it, “we all wanted to dress the same way to create the feeling of belonging to the same tribe. Girls adopt their own state of mind and are not chained down by time.”
In thrall to the discovery of sensuality, these girls are skilfully captured on canvas as they glide through their dream-pop meditations – a magically alluring collection of 14 works which will delight anyone who ventures to step just a few paces from the commercial homogeneity of Oxford Street.
Note: All paintings are acrylic on canvas by Nina Pandolfo and are copyright of the artist and Lazarides Gallery in London.
Editor’s Note: Art, all types of art, is interwoven with the shipping world! Be it paintings, sculpture or music, art is there! So much of professional and business life is enlivened by music – from the famed Foresight Shipping winter BBQ in London to the Posidonia events in Greece! We support the arts, as shipping itself is an art; it is an art to run ships and beyond that to understand the ways of the sea!
Nina Pandolfo
