Born in Greece, Lily E. Smernou moved to the United States in the early 1980s to pursue her doctorate in psychology. Immersed in technology throughout her scientific endeavors, she chose to continue to work with technological tools when she later embarked on creative quests. These tools offered Smernou infinite creative possibilities and the freedom to express her vision.

Working in the style of magic realism, Smernou constructs images that most often incorporate architectural elements, reflecting her primary architectural background. Physical layers devised to create depth, along with inherent perception principles and symbolism distinguish her work. Smernou creates images with narrative qualities, allowing viewers to project their own worlds into her works.

Smernou explains, “My own wonder at the uniqueness and beauty of organic and man-made archetypes, and my fascination with the possibility of synthesizing new forms from existing matter, are the main impetuses for the series. Every image can become a point of departure for the viewer. Specimens, mysterious samplings, and fabrications intend to engage the viewers so they may reflect on the notions of illusion and reality, truth and fiction, beauty and novelty.”

Smernou has exhibited nationally and locally, including major commercial installations in Atlanta. She has enjoyed several awards, been reviewed by The Atlanta Journal Constitution and other city publications, and been published by The Georgia Review.

Antonia Guzman was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1954 and graduated from the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, Prilidiano Pueyrredon. She currently lives and works in Buenos Aires.
 
Art critic Valerie Foley writes, “Guzman makes extensive use of saturated colors applied emotionally, rather than realistically, and modulates those colors to provide definition and depth.  She specializes in mysterious and unreal landscapes in which human figures appear isolated even in crowds. 
She provides a minimum of particulars, allowing the viewer to fill in the blanks with his own imagination.”

“Guzman writes about her grandfather’s migration, at the age of 14, from Italy to Argentina and the effect of this kind of move on immigrants and their descendants.  Her thoughts on such traumatic journeys inspire her richly colored paintings, which often look like compositions by Paul Klee.  Dreamlike visions, in a palette of aquamarine, burnt orange, and ochre, the works touchingly convey the agony of departure through the juxtaposition of geometric shapes, hieroglyphs, and sticklike anthropoid figures.”

Guzman’s works are held by both private and corporate collectors worldwide.  Collectors include Citibank, Buenos Aires, Credit Suisse Bank, USA, Deutsch Bank, The Pompey Museum, Nassau, Las Bahamas, Boston Bank NA, International Bank of Miami, Chase Manhattan Bank, and the University of Essex. Her work is also in the Joan and Milton Bagley Collection, “Masters of Latin America.”

Humberto Castro

Humberto Castro was born in Havana, Cuba on July 9, 1957. He is a graduate from the San Alejandro National School of Fine Arts and the Higher Institute of Art in Havana. He is one of the most important artists of the 80’s generation in Cuba. His work and artistic attitude influenced later generations within the intellectual scope in the island. He has received numerous international awards and his work is internationally acclaimed and shown in renowned museums and private collections.

“His existential language is based on the use of the stylized human figure; the treatment and context of which transmits an array of messages ranging from the political denunciation to the purely poetic.

-Francine Birbragher

Marc Aronson

My paintings rely in their facture on the process of the continued redoing of an image, or the process of destroying an image and restoring it, or the “rephrasing” of a painting. The rephrasing produces a work which is rife with references of the history of its own making. Certain physical locations such as Rome reflect many of the same ideas found in my work. Like a palimpsest it exhibits the nuances of the history of its making. Rome exposes its own references to its past history through evidence of ancient Rome, Byzantine Rome and Renaissance Rome all of the examples of its past are still visible.

What all this adds up to is not only the look of aging and the revelation of the making or history of the work, but through the layers of paint an internal light is produced. It is an imagined light that is like my memories and imaginings of a light of a particular place.

Reception and Lecture - October 6, 2007

In Conjunction with the Consulate General of Mexico in Atlanta and the Instituto de Mexico, Inc.

Lecture by Natalia Guelpa, Leo Matiz's granddaughter at 6pm

Leo Matiz

Beyond the art of photography, Leo Matiz is the poet of vivid images and of unspoken words who gives us over to the unrestrained memory of the moment; moments frozen in time come to our memory through the contrast of light and shadow. Different chapters of our lives have been written in our memory and move through it like a sequence of photographs.

This exhibition has as its primary objective to display the photographs of Frida Kahlo taken by Leo Matiz in 1946, as well as the recreation of these photographs with the assistance of Ángela Pintaldi in 1997. The exhibition includes 27 photographs, including four texturized photographs that were produced for the visually impaired.

Upon completing this study, there were two important considerations that have been integrated into the objectives. The first is the success that marked the professional life of Leo Matiz and the loss of his left eye at the end of the 1970s. The second is the poetry that can be seen in each of his photographs. For this reason, we would like to emphasize both of these facts in our exhibition guide and create an environment that allows these factors to be seen in the work of the artist.

Upon leaving Mexico at the end of the 1940s and after having obtained the Mexican press’ prize for best photojournalist as well as being named one of the ten best photographers in the world, Matiz, a tireless traveler, continued his photographic work in various countries. Supported by working for Reader’s Digest, he traveled across the globe, fulfilling his most sought-after dreams. As he put it, “I was overwhelmed by a yearning to know.” In 1951, he founded the Leo Matiz Gallery in Bogotá, where the first exhibition of the Colombian painter Fernando Botero was displayed.

In 1998, the government of Colombia paid national homage to its most important photographer of the twentieth century. As part of the celebration, the anthology The Metaphor of the Eye, written by Matiz’ biographer, Miguel Ángel Góngora, with the collaboration of Alejandra Matiz, was published, along with a CD-ROM and a television documentary. The National Library of Colombia and the Diners Gallery collaborated for this tribute year, setting up exhibits of the photographs of Leo Matiz. The Leo Matiz Foundation was created, to which the rights to Matiz’ photographs were given. Alejandra Matiz was designated as president of the Foundation with the aim of giving continuity to the promotion of Leo Matiz’ work. Leo Matiz died on October 24, 1998 in Santa Fé de Bogotá, Colombia.

Luis Garcia-Nerey

"What are the components of Being?"

"Can we truly achieve existential authenticity without interaction?"

"Does the Self only exist because of the Other?"

"My study of these questions is the core base of what defines my work. The intentions are for the viewer to give the pieces life only for the span of their reflexive interaction. This necessary interaction for my works to come alive is compatible to the same interaction necessary for all living things to define each other. However complex or simple a subject may be, it still requires the exchange with the Other so as to define its existence. Without this dialog it could be argued that the subject ceases to exist."

"The works also question the ideas of memory and existence. Do the personae survive only inasmuch as they stay in the memory of the viewer? My approach: a philosophical probe into the truth of existence. The goal: to involve the viewer in defining the Self of each subject." -Luis Garcia-Nerey

Patrick Shane Pendley

"Much of my inspiration comes from decorative atmospheres. I select, amplify or simplify botanical forms, wrought iron, and visual icons that are both philosophical and full of visual sentiment. Metaphorically, I feel my work shares in the beauty of experiences, both real and fictitious, though presented in a revelry of nature that carries a whimsical fascination of otherworldly places."

"I work from a self-generated fictitious storybook called “A Painter’s Diary” where I create chapters of work, as opposed to series of work. Each chapter has a title and holds a theme. The storybook and the paintings are filled with imaginative and suggested experiences."

"My creative process used on these paintings involves continual change moving through layers and layers of color and medium. This process evolves into an expression of translucent organic form, accompanied with delicate structure."

“There exist times in life that stand alone in our memories while all other thoughts of particular events fade to obscurity and occlusion.” -Patrick Shane Pendley

John LaHuis

An American painter, John LaHuis was born in 1962 and lives and works in Miami.

John LaHuis uses texture as a strong compositional tool, creating dynamic movement when his brush clashes with canvas or wood. Layering with a variety of media, he seems to enjoy keeping the secret of what has disappeared. Packing tape, childlike sketches, a reversed alphabet and a stream-of-consciousness vernacular are all in his repertoire.

His paintings exist in the unpredictable space between tremendous extremes. His works are simultaneously gestural and geometric, meditative and energetic, figurative and abstract, lofty and prosaic, transparent and dense, turbulent and poised. They maintain a dramatic tension between seeming opposites by employing a richly layered dialect that is open to all sorts of things.

LaHuis literally allows everything to find a place in his paintings. From his personal idiosyncrasies to the titles of pop songs, from historical references to contemporary cultural concerns, from the iconography of the American experience to the gleeful effervescence of Zen, he seamlessly meshes emotional, intellectual and biographical material with formal investigation. By mining the elasticity of painting, the works of John LaHuis force the viewer from the onset to give up on the possibility of any single meaning.

Richard Scott Hill

Richard Scott Hill is a prolific artist who is best known for his sculpture. He received international recognition as a sculptor in 1996 after he completed the Kessler Campanile for the Georgia Institute of Technology; an eighty feet high stainless steel, glass and granite structure which became the centerpiece for the Olympic Village during the Atlanta 1996 Centennial Games.

However, Richard Scott Hill is equally talented as a photographer. His book, “Digital Photography, the Creative Process” is currently being considered for publication by Serbin Publishing. His current series, “Re-visiting the Past” is both surreal and humorous in nature with serious overtones. For example, the piece, “Have You Read the News Today” is a mysterious image in a somewhat morbid story-telling composition. Many of the images include self-portraits of painters from the past, but he adds his own images as the subject matter of these painters.

Pedro Fuertes

Pedro Fuertes was born in Lima in 1958. He studied at the National School of Arts of Perú, where he graduated with honors in 1985 (magna cum laude). His work has been presented in many individual and collective galleries in Perú, as well as, Chile, Guatemala, Venezuela, Italy and Poland.

Despite his continuous practice of realism during his years at the School of Arts; Fuertes chose the abstract path as a way of self-expression. Nevertheless, he never got far away from figurative work, and as a result of the mix of both tendencies he started working with abstract surrealism. His work has been considered musical and silent, mystic and surreal, mysterious and with time and space alteration.

Robert West "Blanco y Negro"

Robert West studied film at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California, and received a BA in 1975 and an MA in 1977 in French Literature from the University of California at Los Angeles, B.A.  He also received the Chancellor’s Fellowship for Graduate Study from the Regents of the University of California.  He is fluent in French, Portuguese, Spanish and English, and has traveled extensively to Australia, Western Europe and Latin America, including, Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru. 

Robert West’s work has been exhibited by galleries in Paris, Los Angeles, and elsewhere with exhibitions including The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the University of Alabama in Birmingham.  His photographs are included in private collections in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, France, Mexico, and the United States.  Private collections of his paintings are also in Australia, Canada, France, Spain, and the United States.