dArt International Magazine – Page 7 – Spring 2026 edition of the making of art, its exhibition, and what we say about it

August 13, 2024February 6, 2025

At Home with Collector Flavio Belli

by Roy Bernardi and Jennifer Leskiw

When you enter the home of Flavio Belli, you are instantly surrounded by his lifetime collection of art. Everywhere you look there are paintings, textiles, drawings, prints, collages, works on paper and photography. Ceramics, sculptures and tiles adorn table tops and shelves. It is an unexpected surprise to see such a vast and varied collection, truly a lifelong passion of collecting.

Flavio Belli is a multi-faceted individual. He is an artist, curator, art consultant, and a partner in a new gallery called Tarantino Belli, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Flavio Belli sitting in his living room in front of his wall of strategically placed portraits

There is so much to see and process we wonder where to begin our conversation. We are impacted by the dizzying array of portraits on the wall directly behind the sofa in the living room. Numerous eyes gaze upon you reminiscent of old stories and recollections of allegories of each procurement, the arrangement constantly changing to Flavio’s inclination.

So, when and how did this passion for collecting art begin?

Flavio’s grandparents owned Angelo’s Restaurant in downtown Toronto from 1920 to 1958. The restaurant was frequented by many artists from Frederick Varley who was a member of the Group of Seven to the likes of Harold Town and celebrities like Boris Karloff, Lucille Ball, Edward G. Robinson and even Ernest Hemingway. Beginning in 1960, Flavio’s father opened Old Angelo’s on Elm Street. Mr. Belli senior was a lover of art and became an avid collector of art books. From time to time, Mr. Belli held art exhibitions in the restaurant consisting of paintings hung on the walls. It was in the collection of his father’s art books that Flavio became acquainted with a book on the work of Chaim Soutine and fell in love with the work and art. Such was the environment in which Flavio grew up.

The walls of Flavio's bedroom and hallway — The walls of Flavio’s bedroom and hallway

In 1960, Rick McCarthy was a student at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. One of his first exhibitions consisted of six landscape paintings, rich with impasto and bold brush strokes and was held at Angelo’s restaurant. It is here that Flavio became acquainted with the artist. Flavio started to compare the work of Soutine to the work of McCarthy. Flavio was ten years old at the time and was enamoured by the thickness and paint application on the surface of each work. An illustration within a book could not do justice to such a technique.

As it turns out, Flavio’s first piece of art was a Rick McCarthy landscape painting from that grouping held at his father’s restaurant many years before. With all of these influences around him, and the acquisition of a McCarthy painting, Flavio decided he wanted to be an artist. And so the journey began.

What is your favourite art work in your collection?

It’s like eating candy… and asking which one you like best? A Greek tile purchased in 1972 is one of Flavio’s favourite pieces. The work of Brian Kipping is another favourite of Flavio’s collection. He knew Kipping and exhibited his work and subsequently purchased four from the artist. Today he owns 10 paintings by Kipping, who passed away in 2007.

What is the highlight for you when collecting? Is it the search or the acquisition?

I would say neither. The highlight of collecting art is for the love of art, the integrity in a work, the way it’s handled, the story behind it and the artist’s focus.

There’s always a story behind a work of art. How it was acquired? How was the work created or what were the circumstances around it? What history lies behind the work? Were there encounters with the artist’s and in part, the artist’s story of his or her life. The struggles, and triumphs?

Flavio standing next to his collection of artifacts acquired over the years

Flavio has been collecting for many decades but there is one story that is his favourite. It begins on a day when he was walking along Queen Street West taking in the many galleries on his walk. Flavio loves to look at art and also the prices of art. He remembers walking into Propeller Gallery and having a look around. On his way out, the woman at the desk told him there was a student show at the back of the gallery and that he should check it out. It was a third year OCAD illustration show. His heart skipped a beat when he saw a work by a young artist by the name of Kieran Brent. It had such a physical effect on him that he knew he had to have the piece. When asked the price, he was told it was $400 but, the work couldn’t be purchased as the piece was going to be exhibited at an OCAD exhibition. Nothing was for sale. However, the artist was going to be at the gallery the next day. Flavio told the woman to tell Kieran that he was purchasing the piece and was going to leave a deposit of $200.

Flavio went back the next day to meet Kieran and pay for the remainder of the sale. As it turns out Kieran’s self-portrait won first prize at the OCAD exhibition and the image was used on a poster promoting the show. Since that time, Flavio and Kieran have become good friends, and Flavio now owns seven self-portraits and a major still-life painting by the artist.

Flavio Belli and life imitating his art collection

Flavio has made many good friends with artists that he has in his collection. As a true collector, Flavio likes to support artists. If there’s talent, he tries to help promote them. He doesn’t believe in buying out of pity or charity but, if an artist is struggling and the work has integrity, he’ll purchase several works.

If you had unlimited funds which artist or artists would you like to own?

Well if I had unlimited funds to buy any art work I wanted, I would purchase Jack Chambers “Sunday Morning #2”. Chambers has the ability to represent reality as accurately and authentically as possible. I’m a huge fan of Chambers, as well as Graham Coughtry. I can really relate to Coughtry’s semi abstraction works of bodies floating on the canvas and of course Andy Warhol whom I can empathize with.

A short video of Flavio Belli speaking about artist Zac Atticus works in his collection may eventually be accessed here.

July 7, 2024July 7, 2024

John Meredith: Last Breaths

by D. Dominick Lombardi

Installation view, (all photos courtesy of the Christopher Cutts Gallery)

The late paintings of John Meridith have a different sort of clarity than his earlier works, where black lines were used to clarify shapes, emphasize movement and forge a foreground. In the last decade of his life, when Meredith switched “…between cigarettes and bronchodilators, likely with a paintbrush in hand…”, he created paintings that are more distilled, direct and meditative. Already an introverted individual, in those last ten years of his life, he became even more reclusive knowing his days were numbered. This was especially true during the onset of his battle with emphysema. This dire reality appears to have pushed the artist toward a more transcendent vision, despite any anger he may have been feeling.

John Meredith, Tangiers No II (1990), oil on canvas, 72 x 60 inches — John Meredith, *Tangiers No II* (1990), oil on canvas, 72 x 60 inches

The earliest of his late paintings here are all from 1990, and they are the five most hopeful and brightest works. Only Tangiers No II has any reference of Meredith’s use of black to clarify his earlier visions. At or just after the beginning of most of the paintings here, Meredith placed strips of tape to mask the white or lightly painted ground of the canvas. At some point in the painting process the tape was removed, and in many instances painted over a bit – or totally if the artist found that relatively clean stripe to be too imposing or distracting to the overall composition. In Tangiers No II, the artist comes close to suggesting a portrait with strangely clownlike features. Any suggestion of humor that might enter one’s thoughts here is quickly dispelled by the large, jet black swathes of paint that obliterate any indication of a mouth, while the splashes of paint thinner, probably turpentine, create purple, black and red drips indicating some sort of distress.

John Meredith, Reclining Figure (1990), oil on canvas, 54 x 65 inches — John Meredith, *Reclining Figure* (1990), oil on canvas, 54 x 65 inches

The most compelling work from the 1990’s is Reclining Figure. To the mostly primary colors of the red, yellow and blue backdrop, the artist adds wide sweeping strokes of heavily muddied white to suggest a lounging subject that is partially obscured by a wash of ochre over the figure’s legs. The brilliance here is the way Meredith utilizes such a heavily contrasted paint application of the figure, as opposed to the rest of the painted surface to work in the greatly abstracted and simplified human form. Placed just right of center, the figure looks backlit by brilliant sunlight – a visual tour de force much greater than the sum of its parts.

John Meredith, Emperor (1993), oil on canvas, 68 x 48 inches — John Meredith, *Emperor* (1993), oil on canvas, 68 x 48 inches

Then there are two paintings from 1993, which bring back the use of black lines – only this time it is more about creating rhythmic upward movement that is both alluring and impermeable in Emperor, or a tangled trap of contrasting thoughts in Key Largo. Then there are four paintings from 1994. The one named Untitled is the most hopeful in palette and approach and reminds me very much of the serene and seductive paintings Matisse made while living in Nice. Conversely, Eroica is the most disturbing work in the exhibition, and consists of two ghostly forms painted over a black ground that interact and look back at the viewer creating a chilling effect.

John Meredith, Eroica (1994), oil on canvas, 74 x 49 inches — John Meredith, *Eroica* (1994), oil on canvas, 74 x 49 inches

The two Untitled paintings from 1997 show most profoundly, the way Meredith worked with masking tape. In both works, the tape is used as a tool to create structure and composition. Working within a very shallow space, the artist manages to create compelling spiritual depth. In their clarity and simplicity, these two paintings remind me of De Kooning’s late works when his debilitating illness changed his approach and aesthetic. The one example from 1999, painted a year before his death, features four white haired feminine forms that intertwine like smoke from one of Meredith’s many cigarettes. A late statement on how life, living, lust and death are fleeting and beyond our control, like smoke from a fire and Meredith is the flame.

John Meredith: Last Breaths, June 6th – July 13th, 2024. Christopher Cutts Gallery, 21 Morrow Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M6R 2H9

June 8, 2024June 8, 2024

Shining Seas: Works by Eleen Lin

D. Dominick Lombardi

Over the past twelve years, artist Eleen Lin has looked to Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick for inspiration, in the production of her long running series collectively titled Mythopoeia. With great and expanding depth and detail, Lin takes every angle, including “the idiosyncratic mistranslations between English and Mandarin versions of the book,” up to today’s lesser looked at undercurrents of homoeroticism and multiculturalism to guide her layered narratives. As a result, this stunningly beautiful and curiously complex solo exhibition stands as a must see show for art lovers and artists alike.

Eleen Lin: Shining Seas, Installation View @ C24 Gallery, (All Photo Credit: Daniel Krieger) — Eleen Lin: *Shining Seas*, Installation View @ C24 Gallery, (All Photo Credit: Daniel Krieger)

In Shining Seas, Lin reveals in exquisite style and varied technical transitions of color and clarity a mystical world in a slightly upturned space that slowly builds in detail and thickness of paint. Here, viewers are left with an expanding experience with surprising clarity that at times crackles and glows in works like The young philosopher (2015), where the ship’s decorative railing, or what is left of the bulwark from the Pequod, appears to protect a nest of eggs perched atop a dangerously damaged deck. Then there are the secondary and tertiary objects like the Chinese yo-yo that hangs from the main mast, the clothespins and the plastic bag attached to one of the cross ropes, the classic red and white life preserver in the distant seas and the large looming ‘shape of water’ woman that bounds up on the horizon. All these components point to both a playful and purposeful approach, adding personal history and global environmental concerns that seep into our subconscious.

Eleen Lin, The young philosopher (2015), oil and acrylic on canvas, 70 x 84 inches — Eleen Lin, *The young philosopher* (2015), oil and acrylic on canvas, 70 x 84 inches

Born in Taiwan, raised in Thailand and now living and working in New York City, Lin carries with her three distinct aesthetic influences that produce surprisingly clean color, a flair for the striking narrative and a pliable use of the metaphor. The central moral of the story that has inspired Lin all these years is the dangers of unrelenting thoughts of revenge. In the novel, all the characters die except the novel’s narrator Ishmael, who survives by using his good friend Queequeg’s coffin as a flotation device. In this presentation of the series, the sense of the fruitlessness of revenge moves from the central theme allowing the artist more range to explore the novel’s after effects on her personal past and present.

Eleen Lin, Crow’s nest (2015), oil and acrylic on canvas, 28 x 36 inches — Eleen Lin, *Crow’s nest* (2015), oil and acrylic on canvas, 28 x 36 inches

As the Mythopoeia series has evolved and expanded over the past dozen or so years, Lin continues to push the narrative both inwardly and outward resulting in visual spaces that pull you into the action, tweaking the viewer’s awareness of the natural trajectory of life. A sensation especially felt in the two larger works The young philosopher (2015) and Life folded Death; Death trellised Life (2024), and the medium sized Crow’s nest (2015).

Eleen Lin, Life folded Death; Death trellised Life (2024), oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 96 inches — Eleen Lin, *Life folded Death; Death trellised Life* (2024), oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 96 inches

Of the three works mentioned so far, Life folded Death; Death trellised Life is the one that takes place on what looks like a stage set made to look as if it is completely under water. Technically speaking, this painting clearly shows the artist’s process working first with thinned layers of acrylic paint applied to a stretched, unprimed cotton canvas, which in this instance sets up a prismatic background that dazzles the eye. A second layer of thin paint is applied with edgy details revealing large leaf flora and shoots of bamboo rendered just enough not to take attention away from the main subject in center stage, the great sperm whale’s complete skeleton. From there, it looks like Lin switches to oils, painting in the precisely rendered whale remains emerging from the confines of a large net, with its head adorned with peacock feathers. Animated as a puppet hanging from several thin black strings, the whale performs on a stage that has curious details, including a computerized light source that periodically changes color.

Eleen Lin, Meet. Greet. Fleet. (2018), oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 96 inches — Eleen Lin, *Meet. Greet. Fleet.* (2018), oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 96 inches

Meet. Greet. Fleet. (2018), one of the first paintings you will encounter when entering the exhibit, is one that addresses the homoerotic aspect Lin finds in Moby Dick. Here we see two fishermen meeting in the open sea, in multi-colored boats set against a colorful rainbowed sky. Like the preliminary painting method previously mentioned, Lin begins with a stunning wash of bright colors across an unprimed canvas. Over this, the artist adds a swirling sea populated by a feisty swordfish who pierces the checkered side of one vessel as it fights for its freedom. Since the many-colored rope that winds around the fish to its imperiled state spools out from a box in the boat on the left, and the fact that the attached fish is nosed nicely into the adjacent boat on the right links the two men together in an extended virtual embrace. An embrace that portends to end in a more personal encounter as signified by the unseen sperm whale that spouts water up and into the point where the two men touch.

Eleen Lin: Shining Seas, Installation View @ C24 Gallery — Eleen Lin: *Shining Seas*, Installation View @ C24 Gallery

What I find most telling in Meet. Greet. Fleet. (2018) is the thickly textured clouds in the sky. Using plaster or perhaps modeling paste in the acrylic paint, Lin attaches weighty clouds that seem to suggest trouble ahead, even though both Thailand and Taiwan had or were debating protections for same sex couples at the time of this painting. Then there are the intricately painted hats and shadows that obscure the men’s faces. Perhaps it is a prophetic reference to the middle of the Trump era as we see so clearly today, how certain politicians and supreme court judges are trying hard to turn back the sands of time.

The exhibition Eleen Lin: Shining Seas features paintings, drawings and watercolor, gouache and graphite on paper by Eleen Lin, and runs through July 19 at C24 Gallery in Chelsea, New York City.

June 8, 2024June 13, 2024

Lorien Suarez-Kanerva: New Spiritual Abstraction

by Steve Rockwell

Lorien Suarez-Kanerva’s New Spiritual Abstraction carries a vital charge that fulfills Bruce Nauman’s claim in the text of his iconic 1967 neon wall sign, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths. There is an import to Suarez-Kanerva’s paintings that impels the viewer toward the sublime, the evident dynamism of the artist’s execution rendering its draught irresistible.

Lorien Suarez-Kanerva, Wheel within a Wheel 50, 2008, watercolor and gouache, 62 x 45 inches — Lorien Suarez-Kanerva, *Wheel within a Wheel 50*, 2008, watercolor and gouache, 62 x 45 inches

The visual gestalt of Elan Flow 6, and particularly Wheel within a Wheel 50, form whirlpools of meticulously painted slivers that deliver A Descent into the Maelström as described by Edgar Allen Poe in his 1841 short story. While Suarez-Kanerva depicts a wheel within a wheel, Poe’s is a story within a story, both revelatory encounters with nature, altogether beautiful and awesome as creations.

The Old Testament prophet Ezekiel experienced his Wheel within a Wheel as a rupture of the visible heavens, revealing the fiery fabric beneath its skin. He described the appearance and structure of the wheels as sparkling like topaz, all four alike, “Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel. As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not change direction as the creatures went.” Not surprisingly, interpreters of our age have imagined alien space craft.

Attempts over the centuries to depict what Ezekiel saw tended to the literal. Modernism, however, has bestowed Suarez-Kanerva the mantle of abstraction, a providential gift to tell her own visual story through her art. The employment of her own brand of the fractal contrasts with the complex mathematical class of geometric shapes. While computers by means of Mandelbrot Sets may generate these forms from virtually anything in our environment from coastlines to mountains, and clouds to hurricanes, each Suarez-Kanerva painting is a unique synthesis of elements directly observed in nature. A fluency in the language of abstraction has made the transcription of her insights in paint authoritative.

Lorien Suarez-Kanerva, Breath of Life 3, 2022, acrylic, 40 x 30 inches — Lorien Suarez-Kanerva, *Breath of Life 3*, 2022, acrylic, 40 x 30 inches

Suarez-Kanerva’s art conforms to a law of geometry that generates a sense of the living from the inorganic. The connection to nature rooted in childhood memories of nature-hikes and world travels had clearly seeded the artist’s vision for creative possibilities. Having grown up in diverse environments such as Oregon and Venezuela further broadened her scope, enabling the inference of broader principles at play in the biosphere. This identification with the “living matrix” has found its medium of expression in the material tools of her craft. The inherent qualities of ink, pencil, pastels, water-colour, gouache and acrylic combined with the properties of paper canvas, and wood, are chemically reactive within the viewer’s sensorium, producing a virtual light show in the rods and cones in the retinal wall of the eye. When channeled through a variety of geometric forms and templates, energy is released. Within the “wheel within a wheel” theme alone, the painterly possibilities presented are virtually infinite.

In Donald Kuspit’s Whitehot Magazine article, The New Abstraction: Lorien Suarez-Kanerva, he observed that the artist has tapped into the sublime by means of a play of opposites, effectively harnessing the tensions between “biosphere and noosphere,” something that Kant had found terrifying and beyond comprehension. Through an active “spiralling” of the universe as a whole, a kind of unity or Omega Point is inferred, arriving at the transcendence that Emerson in his philosophy advanced. Suarez-Kanerva clearly substantiates Nauman’s contention that the work of true artist plays an essential role in the revelation of “mystic truths.”

Lorien Suarez-Kanerva, Beholder, 2023, watercolor and gouache, 30 x 41 inches — Lorien Suarez-Kanerva, *Beholder*, 2023, watercolor and gouache, 30 x 41 inches

The 2023 water-colour and gouache, Beholder is an integration and refraction of tree, flower and insect as if by laser beam, the 2022 Breath of Life acrylic a dissolution into gentle waft, a dematerialization to airy essence. Each atomized fragment, like DNA, carries its blueprint as seeded potential, sealing the image with the hope for perpetuity. With the Elan Flow series, the germinative release of energy verges on the explosive. Here again is an echo of what Poe described as sublimely beautiful, yet awesome in power as latency.

Lorien Suarez-Kanerva, Elan Flow 6, 2019, acrylic, 60 x 60 inches — Lorien Suarez-Kanerva, *Elan Flow 6*, 2019, acrylic, 60 x 60 inches

Suarez-Kanerva is a metamodernist by virtue of the vitalist optimism that infuses her art. The artist’s ability to integrate multiple techniques and theories allow for a plumb of the “the structure of feeling.” Works such as Wildflower Fields, (California Native Plants #2) 2023 and Wheel within a Wheel 112, 2017 retain evidence of the hand, the living gesture as affirmation. Within the diversity of Suarez-Kanerva’s “Visionary Geometries” the point of unifying singularity is the circle, a restless orb in perpetual motion, seeding a harvest from one series of works into another. While the recent Wooded Terrain series of raw wood panel works are devoid of this element, the aura of restless vitality remains.

Lorien Suarez-Kanerva, Wooded Terrain 5, 2021, charcoal, pastel and ink on raw wood panel, 20 x 24 inches — Lorien Suarez-Kanerva, *Wooded Terrain 5, 2021*, charcoal, pastel and ink on raw wood panel, 20 x 24 inches

“I build multiple levels and layers of elaborate designs that emerge from an underlying matrix to create a strong sensation of growth, movement and depth.” The artist’s operating principle of constructing her painting in levels and layers is an understatement. More aptly, Suarez-Kanerva engages in a joyous plunder of the corpus of modernism, its roots and the art of the past. Having surveyed the dazzling complexity of her output, this romp through art history has yielded amply productive treasure. The artist possesses the gift of precisely gleaning the element required from an artist. With Joseph Stella it might have been his dense lattice of abstracted forms. A gloss of the Bauhaus zeitgeist combined with the Abstraction-Creation artists of the 1930s has streamed her influences into an apex in harmony with the Orphism of Robert and Sonia Delaunay. As Robert Delaynay elegantly summarized, “Painting by nature is a luminous language.”

Lorien Suarez-Kanerva’s New Spiritual Abstraction Exhibitions:

June 14 – August 30, 2024 at the Mary G. Hardin Center for Cultural Arts in Gadsden, AL

June 13 – October 18, 2025 at the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Macon, GA

January 2026 – April 2026 at the Phillips Museum of Art, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA

May 21, 2024May 23, 2024