‏Ruth Norman was intrigued and captivated by a crumbling decorated stone arch in Caesarea. This encounter inspired her “Face-of-stone” series. Armed with a phone camera she set out to randomly capture the lavish past of the most beautiful of cities. A city created by Herod to realize his vision of a beautiful, vibrant, white limestone port.

In her journey through the ruins she found ornamental statues dressed in meticulous stone gowns that preserved their charm through time and devastation. Hundreds of spontaneous, extreme close-ups and longshots were hurriedly taken through the distorting lens of accessible technology. Norman found the balance, precision and sentiment between the perfect and crumbling in a statue of Helios – the sun god – with his round, radiant broken face.

She used Tipp-Ex on black paper to immortalize the captivating stone face. Norman has used this technique before but here the use of a limestone derivative was a self-evident bridge between ancient and contemporary art, between the stone’s three dimensionality and the painting’s flatness.

A random visit to Albania, where small towns were built on every hill and cliff – a treasure of historically untended ruins enriched Norman’s stone repertoire. In the Roman temples and Orthodox Byzantine churches even buttresses have hybrid human-animal faces. Norman discovered a unique monstrous humoristic expression: a menacing lion baring his teeth standing on chicken feet; man and woman joined by a mustache. Drawing these figures brought Norman closer to the sculptor and his sentiments when ironically describing heroism, sensuality, sexuality, cruelty and innocence.

Norman’s technique confronts this irony twice. First, when light and image are reversely created: the dark background and the painting radiating from it in white. Next, in the handling of substance: Tipp-Ex dries rapidly dictating swift application with no possibility for repair. To avoid haste, Norman creates puddles of the material on paper, the turpentine evaporates and clouds of diluted material are created on the paper – requiring to be erased for the image to emerge. Erasure exposes the stone faces spreading light and order on the paper. She is like a stonemason shattering his subjects from the stone.

The series reaches a climax when Norman throws her shadow on urban tiles in oil paint applied on wood in a modern, mischievous and ironic response to ancient stone-faces.

Closing: 16.12.12