Sorrow, trauma, apathy, lethargy. A grim roll-call by any standards, but as the wet season descends, surely there can be no better time to turn the eyes inward and contemplate one’s very existence? It’s precisely this type of intense, soul-stirring introspection that’s triggered when gazing too long or too hard at the work of Battambang-born Nov Cheanick – a graduate of the Phare Ponleu Selpak school of arts and perhaps best known for his life-sized sculpture of a green cow at Phnom Penh airport – in his new exhibition, Rain.
From between form-distorting droplets of moisture, mournful souls peer out at whichever existential storm-chaser faces the painting. Tiny rivulets of colour creep horizontally across canvas, like wind-blown raindrops along the window of a speeding train. Rain, here, is a metaphor; one for that grimmest of roll calls mentioned in the opening par. Nov says sorrow and trauma lead to apathy and lethargy, and this is especially apparent in the Cambodian countryside, where farmers and labourers can achieve little during rainy season and so, in quiet resignation, do nothing at all.
In many of the textured-to-the-touch images, figures sit waiting, partly revealed under the paint splatter of falling rain. In others, the landscape is drenched into obscurity. On smaller canvases there’s the suggestion of clarity, with the portrait of a mysterious man emerging from a dark background, or disappearing into a lighter one. “I don’t want to read any more books of suffering that people have wrote,” Nov says. “Write a new page of happiness; find peace in the dirty place with a dirty life.” Says curator Dana Langlois, from Java Arts: “In this poetic, introspective work, he calls for action – not the storm-the streets kind of action, but the kind of action that transforms the spirit.”
Rain, by Nov Cheanick, is open at Java Café & Gallery, #56 Sihanouk Blvd, now.