Tales of Books and Art

Ekaterina Panikanova’s fantastic three-dimensional artworks on books blur the lines between painting, installation and collage, while taking viewers down memory lane on a journey into childhood.

Let us go down memory lane and back to our childhood, to times of innocence and joy, to tales filled with fantastic characters and magic stories. Let us take our old storybooks and revisit them, feel their unmistakable smell, fall again under their irresistible spell.

Ekaterina Panikanova, born in St. Petersburg in 1975 and presently based in Rome, invites us to do just that with her art. She creates highly original, densely layered paintings across large spreads of old books, school magazines, posters from different times and other such materials which she finds in flea markets.

An Explosion of Colours

Truong Buu Giam’s awesome paintings display an overwhelming explosion of colours, challenging the limits of conventional art and subtly blending Eastern and Western Art traditions.


Very much in tune with the editorial line of this blog, the artist we are featuring today states the following about Art: “Art is an international language, it doesn’t matter what race you are, where you come from, you have a feeling when you listen to a song, look at a painting, you have your emotion, only you know it in your soul, so Art touches the heart and makes people feel.”

A Kind of Magic

Rob Gonsalves’s mind-bending and stunning paintings invite viewers to step into the magic realm of his unique Magic Realism.

“It’s a kind of magic; one dream, one soul, one prize, one goal, one golden glance of what should be”… sing “The Queen” in their famous song. And, indeed, it is in a kind of magic that we are about to enter taken by the talent of Rob Gonsalves.

Let There Be Colour!

Mark Lovejoy creates stunning hypnotic images, which are colourful psychedelic statements of a ground-breaking art field. 

At the outset of a brand new year, let us try to look at the world with fresh eyes and bright colours! When news broadcasts open daily with descriptions of natural disasters, devastating wars, dramatic accidents and other such sad situations, we do need to “wash” our eyes with beauty and colour.

Travelling in Misty Lands

Travelling in Misty Lands: Valerio D’Ospina takes us on a fascinating trip through his thought-provoking oil paintings depicting beautifully dramatic cityscapes.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes”, an adaptation of a sentence by famous French novelist Marcel Proust in ‘In Search of Lost Time’ could well become our touchstone to look at Valerio D’Ospina’s fantastic paintings of blurred cities. In fact, his artworks not only offer audiences completely unexpected aspects of well-known iconic symbols of towns around the world, but they also show the artist’s very own, personal way of seeing those same towns.

A Touch of Radiance

Phan Thu Trang’s minimalistic paintings offer viewers unexpected landscapes of unique freshness and radiance.

Think of the verdant, lush forests of Vietnam. Now think of beautiful naïve paintings depicting landscapes. Consider the magic effect that such paintings always seem to exert on us by taking us back to the innocence and freshness of our childhood years. Combine all these ingredients and picture yourselves taking a walk through such imaginary scenery. You have entered Phan Thu Trang’s realm.

This time, for a change…

...Touching Art was invited to the opening of a solo exhibition by Portuguese painter Alexandre Magalhães. Held on May 1, 2014, at Ericeira, a small beautiful fishing village a few kilometres north of Lisbon, we couldn’t miss this opportunity to offer you something different and to introduce a Portuguese artist.

Alexandre Magalhães, born in Lamego, a small town in the north of Portugal, and living in Ericeira, is a retired colonel who has dedicated his time to his favourite activity: painting. A self-taught painter, he started painting in 1995 having first tried his skills at watercolours. About ten years ago, however, he resorted to oil paint on linen canvas and a palette-knife. Since then, he has exclusively been using these materials and perfecting his technique through a long and patient process of experimenting, which gives him the pleasure of challenging his own limits, skills and talent.

Rainbow Reflections

“A happy childhood can’t be cured. Mine will hang around my neck like a rainbow...” once stated Hortense Calisher, an American novelist and short-story writer of unpredictable turns of phrases. This incredibly beautiful way of describing a happy childhood seems to fit like a glove Ester Roi, a talented and creative artist who says about herself, her source of inspiration and her creative and ethereal artworks: “I’m inspired when I’m fearless, when I put on my child-like glasses and look at the world as if I’d never seen it before. In that state of mind I find inspiration everywhere.”

Tempus fugit

“... Time flees irretrievably, while we wander around, prisoners of our love of detail", stated the Roman poet Virgil in his poem Georgics. Commonly found under the form of an inscription on clocks, it enhances our concerns about the fleetingness of time and the ravages thereby caused. This further evokes French author Marcel Proust´s work À la Recherche du Temps Perdu – “In Search of Lost Time” – whose theme is exactly the anguish and grief about time that has irretrievably gone.