THE ART OF EMERALD AZZURRA 2022 Edition
Much like the act of voyage, the artworks of Emerald Azzurra transport you to another place.
A contemporary playground for a series of modernist, abstract, and expressive works of art, the opulent interior surroundings of Emerald Azzurra invite the viewer to recall their memories and experiences. From the strikingly bold to the delicately beautiful - stylistic, material, and thematic variations cohere into an outward-looking and exploratory manifesto for travel. Amongst the vast, sun-soaked interiors, striking compositions find a balance with the elegant on board palette of charcoal, limestone, and taupe. Freestanding sculptures receive the breathing space they deserve, and the careful placement of canvases creates harmony with textured glasswork, mirrored surfaces, and wood finishes.
Here, we bring together four of Emerald Azzurra’s artists, delving into the creators, the creations, and the transformative effect the pieces have on Emerald Azzurra’s refined interior spaces.
Benvindo de Carvalho 4-5
Luis Rodrigues 6-7 Peter Leyenaar 8-9
Joseph Bayol 10-11
Benvindo de Carvalho
Born in Cabeceiras de Basto, Portugal, whilst today Benvindo de Carvalho is celebrated for his bold acrylic paintings, his artistic endeavours began with sculpture. Having studied sculptural technique at the Porto School of Fine Arts, the Soares dos Reis School of Arts, and the coveted Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, de Carvalho emerged onto the Portuguese national art scene as a cross-disciplinary artist, exhibiting a powerful array of sculptures, drawings, and paintings.
Though non-pictorial, de Carvalho’s paintings are loaded with symbolism, utilising abstract shape and colour in referencing the works of the Old Masters or interpreting the Portuguese landscape. In his works, de Carvalho takes an approach to abstract expressionism that counters the often wild and unrestrained nature of the movement. The artist is meticulous in crafting atmospheres from textured surfaces, exploring a balance of light and shade. His lyrical and meditative motifs depict a calm and peaceful temperament that skilfully retains the freedom and spontaneity of the genre. His paintings display all the intuitive mark-making of Willem de Kooning or Jackson Pollock, though executed in a rare, serene and calming manner.
On board Emerald Azzurra, de Carvalho’s Birth of Venus knowingly evokes and reimagines a masterwork of the Renaissance era, Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. Here, de Carvalho plays with mythology within his distinct visual language. The attention-drawing flash of light at the heart of de Carvalho’s image viscerally recalls Botticelli’s portrayal of the goddess Venus, an evocation that finds its impact through this finely balanced obscurity, abstract expressionism that refuses to abandon structure and figurativism entirely. The central burst of brilliance, Venus, is absorbed by sepia tones encroaching upon it, the essence of the west wind, Zephyr, and the nymph, Chloris. Through de Carvalho’s depiction, all the emotion of the mythical tale is brought to the fore without the use of representational elements.
Luis Rodrigues
Through thick layers of paint, Luís Rodrigues creates metropolises of abstraction. His creative vision, rooted in abstract expressionism, is fuelled by elucidation, and how much the artist wishes to reveal to us, the viewer. When viewing a Rodrigues canvas, one may find apparent pictorial references—a silhouette here, a window there—or, one may be forced, with manifest reward, to search for clues, a visual aid or pattern. By allowing one’s gaze to roam a Rodrigues piece, landscapes, figures, and scenery, break from their veiled abstraction, with the untitled works acting as a Rorschach test with which the viewer is encouraged to project memories and connect dots.
Whilst Rodrigues encourages the viewer to explore their minds-eye, the artist’s gaze is ever-present. A child of Torres Novas, Portugal, Rodrigues uses an undeniably Portuguese colour palette, and many of the motifs he deploys seemingly spring from his surroundings. The fortified municipality of Torres Novas sits along the Rio Almonda River and is separated from the Atlantic coast by the Natural Park, Serras de Aire e Candeeiros. Within Rodrigues’ visual motifs, you’ll find a varied use of the colour blue, from visceral ultramarines to paled shades of turquoise, often balanced or juxtaposed with varying shades of white. The artist’s vibrant visual language is synonymous with the landscape of his hometown, impossible to separate despite the artist’s use of abstraction.
On board, two Rodrigues canvases face each other with a contrasting impact. Both untitled pieces, one makes use of a cool, calming palette of blues, greens, and yellows resembling a tranquil coastal setting. Here, the linework is soft and ill-defined, blurring into the serenity of the backdrop. In the other, intense bands of vibrancy, reds, purples, and oranges streak the canvas, demanding one’s attention. The linework here is heavier, encouraging the viewer to search for recognisable shapes, forms, and outlines, and the busyness depicted is reminiscent a cityscape.
The joy of a Rodrigues painting lies within interpretation. Wherever Emerald Azzurra sails, and whichever destination one visits, can often be found within the fragments of these canvases.
Peter Leyenaar
With their slender, elongated frames, Peter Leyenaar’s sculptural renderings draw natural comparisons to the works of celebrated Swiss master Alberto Giacometti. However, in Leyenaar’s compositions, we find none of the heavily-worked, ravaged existentialism typifying Giacometti’s style. Instead, in Leyenaar, we see a tenderness of spirit. A polished approach, embracing the interconnectedness of humanity and championing communion, cohesion, and fellowship.
With a focus on kinship, Leyenaar delicately explores the interplay of physical space and emotional accord. In works entitled; In Love, Shoulder to Shoulder, and Connectedness, we see Leyenaar’s zestful depictions of human attachment between interplaying characters. And, despite material solidity and the amount of space they occupy, Leyenaar’s sculptures remain compositionally light and airy. The artist’s adoration of classical ballet is apparent in the graceful and tender indications of motion and movement he installs, with Leyenaar’s representation of bodily presence reflecting the most elegant aspects of human physicality. Yet, amidst the buoyancy of Leyenaar’s themes, there is a yearning. Free of great detail, facial shapes are merely denoted and suggested, assuring that while figures appear to observe and contemplate, no gaze is present. Devoid of arms, the statued figures regard one another with a tenderness incapable of embrace, creating a perennial sense of longing.
Even in the face of this suggested yearning, this layer of complexity, Leyenaar’s sculptural works offer hope, a response to the modern world that combats the insular, in favour of affinity.
Aboard Emerald Azzurra are two freestanding Leyenaar sculptures, Three figures and Three in a circle. In Three figures, a union is clear, feet remain rooted to the base as silhouettes bend inwards as though rapt in intimate, perhaps personal, conversation, signifying closeness. With Three in a circle, the relationship is more ambiguous. Here, feet are in step, elevated from the base of the piece as though in preparation for departure. Body language is more difficult to discern as profiles arch apart, lending the work an atmosphere of anticipation, of eagerness.
Les Coquelicots
Joseph Bayol
Heavily influenced by his surroundings as well as the artistic heritage of the region, Joseph Bayol paints an evocative admixture of Provençal artistic history. From the neoclassicists through to the impressionists and fauvists, odes to the far-reaching and rich artistic heritage of Provence are found throughout Bayol’s oeuvre. Taken under the wings of the radical pre-fauvists when Bayol was just a young man and fledgling artist, he would later depart from the heavily abstracted representations of his forbears without abandoning their artistic mechanisms entirely. Bayol paints with the mastery and attention to detail of bygone traditionalism, adding layers of emotion through subtle abstraction.
Bayol is captivated by his immediate surroundings and with good reason.
From his studio, the Alpilles, the foothills of the Ventoux, the Cevennes, and, on a clear day, a thin blue stretch of the Mediterranean Sea, can be seen, glorious Provençal landscapes once frequented by the greats—Cezanne, Picasso, van Gogh. These surroundings have an unsurprising influence on Bayol’s artwork, whose daily devotion to his craft sees him analysing and depicting the grand and the minutiae details of the landscape.
On board Azzurra, Faceties Bleus beautifully illustrates the artist’s ability to combine genres. In this painting, hyper-realistic botanical details dominate the foreground imagery, abstractly thawing into a solid field of background yellow. This technique borrows from the
fauvist influences that have stayed with Bayol throughout his life, creating an effect that, far from reducing the work to pure abstraction, emulates the human eye, a detailed, focussed foreground that fades from view, a realism born of the abstract. The second Bayol piece aboard Emerald Azzurra, the triptych Les Coquelicots, depicts a field of wild poppies. This piece similarly explores the depth of field and the interplay between foreground and background. Here, Bayol is more expressive with his brushstrokes, textures, and palette, reversing the impact and technique used in Faceties Bleus. Whereas Faceties Bleus slowly builds into a backdrop of colour, Les Coquelicots’ vivid release of textures and tones dances its way towards the edge of a lustreless field, depicted at the very top of the canvas, it contains all the colour and energy within its border.
Faceties Bleus
