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Lot Essay
Rising talent Luis Lorenzana has been lauded for his immaculate painting technique, reminiscent of Old Master artists, and boundless imagination through which he conceives whimsical and engaging fictional characters. In Lady with Bluefallo (Lot 566), the artist continues to channel Rembrandt and Hals, but combines the formal composition and style of Golden Age Dutch portraiture with the equally painstaking process of white painting. "At the onset of conception," Lorenzana shares, "the overall image (half classic, half white) was already well-planned."
Features are multiplied as if the subject's face has been painted through broken glass. The wide-eyed portrait sitter gazes out of a dark room, shifting in and out of the serene whites of a more surreal world. But while the work seems so starkly halved, the dividing line is not a strict limit. This strange, seemingly fragmented universe seeps past the borders of the picture and into the frame itself, negating boundaries without troubling the artist's meticulous composition, suggesting that painting and frame were never really separate in the first place. "The frames are an interesting extension of the paintings," Lorenzana says. "It's classic, and yet at the same time it's not." Colored pinpricks and seahorses play in both black and white; a bright streak in the corner binds the worlds; the lady is very much a part of both. Her eyes are always vital and luminous. In the artist's hands, fragmentation multiplies; it doesn't sunder.
At the heart of all this sits the eponymous creature, horned and adorable, and conspicuously blue. The selection and positioning of objects in traditional portraiture is always significant, but the Bluefallo is far too curious a creature to simply be a token. It stares out at the viewer as intently as the woman holding it, not merely an object of interest but a second subject altogether.
Features are multiplied as if the subject's face has been painted through broken glass. The wide-eyed portrait sitter gazes out of a dark room, shifting in and out of the serene whites of a more surreal world. But while the work seems so starkly halved, the dividing line is not a strict limit. This strange, seemingly fragmented universe seeps past the borders of the picture and into the frame itself, negating boundaries without troubling the artist's meticulous composition, suggesting that painting and frame were never really separate in the first place. "The frames are an interesting extension of the paintings," Lorenzana says. "It's classic, and yet at the same time it's not." Colored pinpricks and seahorses play in both black and white; a bright streak in the corner binds the worlds; the lady is very much a part of both. Her eyes are always vital and luminous. In the artist's hands, fragmentation multiplies; it doesn't sunder.
At the heart of all this sits the eponymous creature, horned and adorable, and conspicuously blue. The selection and positioning of objects in traditional portraiture is always significant, but the Bluefallo is far too curious a creature to simply be a token. It stares out at the viewer as intently as the woman holding it, not merely an object of interest but a second subject altogether.