Artist Profile

Norlie Meimban

Artist Statement

Ani-motion
Norlie Meimban worked as an artist in animation for many years in the United States.  Ani-motion his latest and 12th solo show at Ysobel Gallery showcases his graphic paintings creatively rooted in this visual game and field where he fully immersed in.  Meimban puts together a polished mash between animation and painting turned into a legible whole but verily reveals the peculiarly graphic lexicon and panache of animation which bears both its craft and art.  These figurative paintings are distinctly characterized by clean lines, expressive qualities and sensibilities of the human form which overtly show Meimban’s background in drawing and technical command in figurative art.  Mostly, these are sequences of images that create an internal narrative, or it could be another focal image with reconstruction of its motion giving them more lively presence on canvas.  Images were stringed into various poses showing incremental movements in crisp corporeal rhythms like a time lapse video in a single surface. Here, he ably creates a continuum of individual outlined, inchoate and flickering anatomical images which suggest and complete a series of unbroken motion and flow.   This visual technique is often employed by photographers in photographic stroboscopy.    Sometimes, he overlaps or juxtaposes figurative outlines into another separately painted surface or times it could be just images with mere tiny hints of motion as in the tradition of sequential art. Clearly, the artist’s explicit intent is to prolong physical encounters a bit further; he proffers the theatrical potential of human/physical movement which can evoke cause and effect and also play on the idea of daily ephemera and impermanence.    Consistently, Meimban explicitly declares dynamics as his intent to visualize patterning of actions--- they all point to a sequence and linearity as this exhibition’s lucid feature.  In a sort of diagrammatic forms, the artist immortalizes every single gesture simultaneously referencing and completing a process of serial actions or positions of objects as memory could have accumulated them.  Conversely, he just wants to us to see another visual reality. And with all its graphic fluency removes the need for words but as these works of art elicits an immediate scan as a whole, they also insist on careful, piecemeal examination.