Press Reviews

Here are some published quotes from various art critics:

“Elahi may today be considered one of the most accomplished and subtle landscapists in the book of South African art. She indeed expresses most poignantly the temper and temperament of our wilds. It has, over the past 30 years, been my special pleasure to see the talent of Alice Elahi evolve and mature into the succinct distillation it now is. For Elahi is, above all, a poet of colour.”

Johan van Rooyen, Pretoria News 2002  

“The artist has been on a life-long quest to respond to the siren’s call of the sea, silence, to trace the ecstatic pace of time and space and to return with these rare visions of the world, bringing back personal pictures of perfect moments… Her paintings are light and breezy, flowingly rendered with the apparent ease that familiarity with the ebb and flow of nature graces the persistent with.”

Miranthe Staden-Garbett  Pretoria News 2004

“Elahi visits and revisits a few favourite places that have become her haunts – Namibia, the West Coast, the southern tip of the Cape, the coastal line of the Eastern Cape and the Waterberg. These places, each with their own particular beauty, are sensitively portrayed by Elahi on the canvas as a mélange of colours, each daub of paint carefully considered, with a few subconscious flashes of spontaneous colouring… Each landscape encapsulates Elahi’s total joy of colour and appreciation of the way a landscape changes.”

Orielle Berry Pretoria News Nov 6 2001

“Here’s an artist who dares to paint – simply paint. She takes risks, allowing things to happen spontaneously as she covers her paper and canvas with gestural marks which are expressive, emotive and often exciting.

The content of Alice Elahi’s painting is Colour, and in the monochrome works, Form. It’s an art of high risk, and when it works, as much as it does, the results express a joy in media, subjects – and life.”

Benita Munitz Cape Times 1980 (about Harbour of the Cape of Storms)

Because she is very much tuned-in to these landscapes, it is a very African Impressionism. Her main focus is the vitality and movement in nature. Some works are almost abstract and very simplified: merely a wash of colour that suggests a rolling bank of fog or a single crashing wave. Others are more complex: textured shade, sand and grasses stretch out to rushing waves and billowing clouds.

But the works are also Expressionist. There is a great deal of emotion captured in these scenes.

Elahi has a reflective gift: she mirrors landscapes but never illustrates. Here is a mature artist very much in control of intention and technique.

Muffin Stevens  Pretoria News Nov 1992 (about Sea Mists and Silence)

“Those who have visited this strange and solitary part of the world will be reminded of the pleasure they experienced; those who have never been may be encouraged to go there and see for themselves.”

Sheila Cohen Business Day Oct 1984