OLIVIA M. PENDERGAST & MÉNÉ: Origins & Connections

Olivia Mae Pendergast, a melody to humanity

Olivia's paintings are a song, a melody to humanity, to the dignity that each person can be a Garden of the Hesperides, a galaxy filled with moons, stars, and comets, a botanical universe teeming with flowers and insects.

The artist leaves nothing to chance, she doesn't paint aimlessly, she cares deeply about the gaze and every detail, but also about the background, the surroundings, the air breathed by the subject, and the color that frames the energy or languor of the woman posing proudly for the photo, which will later become a drawing, then a sketch, and then a painting.

Pastel colors, slightly spicy, with flavors that are somewhat electric. Background tones that are like brilliant spices: anise, mustard, dried orange peel, fresh ginger, mint, and tarragon. Those backgrounds close a circle that begins with the artist's humility, asking neighbors and passersby if she can photograph them.

Pendergast's work is an attractive and delicate hieroglyph that is read with closed eyes. The figures, which after looking at them for so long seem like family, are silent but invite departure, introspection, reading, sitting down, and getting lost in the details, in the corners of the canvas that are finished but do not seem so, happily incomplete because they still have a life ahead.

Méné, connections with cave art

Méné directs his gaze to the landscape that surrounds us, both the physical landscape and that of the mind that appears when we close our eyes. These are real and figurative landscapes made of dreams, nourished by dreams, and a source of dreams. Not only that, his work connects with ancient African arts, with the thread and needle of sewing, basket weaving, masks, and the most vehement present. It speaks to us about the mutilation of our planet, the extraction of the sap that nourishes the earth, overexploitation, desiccation... and the struggle and denunciation that come with reversing these processes.

There is something initiatory, a faith in the wild, and cave art in the work of the Ivorian artist, where there is neither perspective nor escape, which gives the viewer the freedom to explore every inch of the canvas with the same attention. And that is important because surrealism is rooted in that freedom, and its religiosity has no commandments but palpitations that invite levitation.

"Cave art is an initial source of inspiration," the artist tells us, "and a subject of study. I don't imitate it, but I am interested in that process of hunting, of seeing the beast once it is brought down and, therefore, discovering its form. There is something dreamlike, worshipful, and therapeutic in that form of ancestral painting. I like it."

Felip Vivanco
Art critic
La Vanguardia, Barcelona, Spain