Reanna Emanouel

Reanna Emanouel is a figurative and landscape painter who has exhibited in Australia and the United States. Her most notable exhibitions include PetrieTerraceGallery in Brisbane City, Brunswick Street Gallery in Melbourne, NewYork City Children's Foundation Gallery, and Icosahedron Gallery in New York. Reanna describes her art as working “with both realism and abstraction,often combining them to capture inner states and unspoken narratives and particularly interested in how visual art can serve as a mirror for self-reflection, not just for the artist, but for the viewer as well”.

The paintings are typically executed with oil on linen and often contain impasto and sometimes even sand texture medium to give her works a thick, rich texture. Reanna Emanouel’s works are often a reflection of past trauma due to her experience of losing her entire family in a tragic incident. Because of such takes, the work can often take a dark or dream-like turn, often detached from reality and delving into the darkest and most isolated parts of the mind. Containing an extraordinary amount of realism almost resembling photography but with a smooth painterly application, the paintings often depict women interacting with various forms of linen which either binds or wraps them up like a cloak of attire. 

These fantastical paintings do not represent reality but rather a state of consciousness which resembles solitude and reflection. The women are often pale and fragile through their body language, usually through frail posture and relaxed, drooping expressions. Reanna’s landscapes, whether containing the figure or not, convey notions of grandeur and hallucinogenic and pale colors as well as forms evoking an almost mythological or ancient interpretation of nature, rather than one based in reality. Nature in an idealized form, whether interacting with her figures or not, creates a solemn mood yearning for escape and comfort.

Bound by Grace (pictured above) portrays a woman dressed in fine linen which seems to have a life of its own. The fabric seems to swallow the composition and the figure’s posture appears one of relief and releasing stress. She seems almost related to the intricate folds and forms of the linen as the fine garment appears to strategically wrap her chest, head, and foreground as if to make a statement about emotional impulses.

Reanna Emanouel creates intricate paintings which seem to have a life of their own. Much like the fantastical novels of great writers such as Jules Verne or Frank Herbert, her works seem to depict figures which are characters, rather than just models. Each has a story to tell as they wrap themselves up in fine linen or lay half-naked on an open landscape full of life and imaginative colors. Reanna is a gifted painter who takes the medium far beyond what most artists achieve in today’s time through subtle psychology, dream-like landscapes, poetic interpretations of motifs such as interactions with linen, and astonishing realism. She invokes frailty and vivid emotion with each composition through carefully choreographed body language and facial expressions. Much like a theatre director, Reanna creates dramatic scenery which evoke poetic displays of relationships between characters and their environments or compositions. Reanna Emanouel’s brush remains refined, philosophical, poignant, and sincere to her experiences and vivid imagination.

https://reannaemanouel.artweb.com