Painted surprise: Terence Roberts at the Centre for Brazilian Studies
This week Alim A. Hosein reviews a Terrence Roberts exhibition of paintings. Alim Hosein is a linguist, artist and critic attached to the English Division of the Department of Language and Cultural Studies at the University of Guyana.
By Alim A. Hosein
Terence Roberts has been exhibiting his small, highly-coloured abstract-looking artwork in Guyana since his return here in 1995. Previous to this, he had exhibited in Guyana as part of the ‘Expressionova’ group which in the 1970s tried to move Guyana’s art into a more avant-garde direction. He has also been writing about cinema and in particular, discussing expressions of sensuality in that medium. The celebration of the sensuous, and his championing of it as an expression of humanism and progress, has been a feature of his work.
His current artwork continues in the avant-garde manner which he promotes consciously. In his catalogue comments to his most recent exhibition, Kaieap, at the Centre of Brazilian Studies (April 25-May 9), he declares that his art is “not an academic method, or process of paint application, or drawing. It is an art that follows no taught process…” His focus is on the act and processes of creativity, the non-reliance on depiction, the avoidance of mannerisms or of the picturesque. As he puts it, “each painting invites contemplation of creative order in a surprising, unacademic, anti-mannerist way.”