Rahmi presents tasteful thorough colorful oil paintings that have a sense of tense reverence. An artfully applied logic is coupled with the chance of color rubbed over combed gesso patterns. The works are well balanced and feel as though human figures have been idealized and distilled through warm tonal flecks. Stark contrast to Rahmi’s type of Turkish lyricism is found among the welded metal sculpture of Bernice Kussoy. Here we walk among a contemporary classic, filled with nuts, bolts, screws, pipes, wire, nails, springs, plates, pans, cut rubbed and rusted metals that have transmuted the material into an alchemy of spirit. The soul of the works is a great heart that fills with joy and beauty, seeing through coarse appearance the love that shines in a joyous trumpeting angel, a cellist pausing, a patriarch, a squatting woman, a touch of metal magician that tells loving stories. The works as “Flora” stand as a burnished aggregate, balanced, harmonious, peaceful. “Girl with Necklace” joins a bicycle chain necklace to yearning hands, and a face of strange lyric magic forms an iron mask, breasts rounded, rubbed, nailed and stretched as armor over a heart that offers itself in mute, eloquent angular grace.
—S. C. Schoneberg
