Romany Eveleigh, born in London but raised in Montreal, came from an artistic background: she was the daughter of painter and designer Henry Rowland Eveleigh and the artist’s model Ivy Florence Beasley. The works on paper glued to canvas – Pages (1973) and Tri-Part (1974) – take their visual cue, materials, and techniques from the written and printed page. The Pages drawings are characterised by the repetition of the letter “o”, which fills the square support in columns of vertical text, creating irregular bands of faint colour, so that from a distance these abstract works appear as the pages of a book or printed media. Eveleigh’s practice is produced as writing but does not communicate a message. Rather, the fields of flat colour covering the surface of the page are a reminder of the gesture of the artist’s hand and have been likened to the work of colour field painters. Despite the all- over text, the effect is a pared-down sparseness that the artist has remarked upon as “not a sought-after end but a sought-for beginning.”
This is the first time the work of Romany Eveleigh is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Teresa Kittler
