Ely Magos

I am what I do ...

Ely Magos: To be and to struggle

By Martin Eich * (Die Zeit; FAZ)

The whole of Ely Magos work, whose portraits will be highlighted in what follows, is characterized by a sensitive feeling of the play of light and shadow as well as by a relationship without illusion to reality. . Besides numerous individual works, several cycles form the heart of his work, both as a continuation of a previous theme ("epic painting") and as a variation on a closed circle of motifs. Ely Magos is thus in line with artists such as Marc Chagall (The Thousand and One Nights, The Dead Souls) or Edvard Munch (Artist and model, Les noces de la bohème), who have seen in cycles and series of paintings a means of making a subject accessible to the viewer. The central motif of Ely Magos work is the illustration of man in phases of loneliness and isolation. He is more interested in the individual than in socio-political questions, without ignoring them completely. 

The reasons for the mental state of his characters remain hidden. But his work also responds to aesthetic requirements: his works want to touch without imposing themselves, to please without being addictive and thus to slip into an aestheticism as banal as sterile. One of the strong points is the representation of women, which the painter integrates into contemplative references. These protagonists always have an aura of isolation, sensitivity, loneliness and melancholy. Her works are therefore case studies of a female psyche who, banished in the isolation of her own physicality, longs for contact and security. At the same time, the female figures of Ely Magos have something of the night owl and a complacent conscience. Besides the precise use of shadow and light, this effect is intensified by the sometimes amorphous appearance of the women depicted, which differs markedly from the harsh, almost plastic figuration used by Jan Vermeer. 

Unlike the American author John Updike who in his prose works only attributes to sexuality the ability to overcome existential loneliness and despair, Ely does not accord this status to eroticism in his paintings. In these films, only the possibility of a rapprochement, perhaps temporarily limited, is represented; the resolution of the events described remains undetermined for the viewer. Hermann Hesse has already described the way in which Ely Magos sees the relationship between man and woman: “There is always an open abyss between men, as intimately linked as they are, that only love, and only with a bridge. fortune, can fill.