Lena Hilton

Lena Hilton paints in series, each time asking herself the question of how to paint. In the last of these, with an economy of means, she plays with the fluidity of a deliberately restricted chromatic range, letting the trail of her brushes slide, layer after layer. The colors overlap, the hues become denser and structure their own space. Precise and ordered dilutions reveal shapes and luminosities. Through multiple passages, she thus creates for herself a possible interstice in a history saturated, and too often brutally monumental, with abstract forms. Without leaving any traces, but with constancy and concentration, she infuses her canvases with colors, reappropriating patterns and re-experimenting what painting can have that is voluptuous and sensitive. But gentleness is only appearance. His bias is strong. His gestures have the cloudy lightness of mastery. None of them is hazardous, to be able to be forgotten at this point. Only their soft passages remain, of which no reproduction technique would make it possible to render the emotional and poetic density. If its range of colors is bright and simple, each shade used seems to contain the full spectrum of its possibilities. - Samuel Gross