The natural world hides secrets and mysteries that have always fascinated and frightened man. Its shapes and colours tickle the human imagination, giving rise to intricate linguistic codes. Science has helped to unravel their workings, bringing to light their magical and romantic aspects, as well as their complicated and harmonious life structure. Artist Mevlana Lipp has been fascinated by nature since his childhood, growing up in a small village in Germany. “Nature has always been a real but also an imaginary place of desire for me, it has something heavenly about it. Not in the sense of a perfect world, but clear and true in all facets.“
In Mevlana Lipp’s works, nature takes on an ethereal flavour dictated by the bright, fluorescent colours that give an alien appearance. Purple and green chromatically dominate the compositions, made up of sinuous and mystical forms that the collective imagination codifies as otherworldly natures, from parallel, distant and unexplored worlds. Likewise, the plant creatures become mother gods with a primordial flavour, taking the viewer back to the origin of the world, to Adam and Eve’s Garden of Eden and to that moment in existence when they ruled supreme.
Biomorphism, which tends particularly towards phytomorphism (referring to the natural world) is explored by Lipp in a language that oscillates between sculpture and painting. The works acquire a three-dimensionality, attempting to emerge from the wooden support that the artist covers with velvet. The organic forms are in fact first drawn and then placed on a wooden board, which is then cut by the artist, painted and applied to the support. Mevlana Lipp’s bas-reliefs celebrate nature in its wildest aspect, provoking a certain melancholy and sadness that reflects on the destructive action of man, now a stranger to his own Mother. By accentuating the magical and alien component of the subjects, Mevlana interposes an emotional distance between nature and man, thereby emphasising our estrangement from it.
Courtesy Mevlana Lipp
