Didier Lourenço. Primera Persona
Reus From March 19, 2021 to April 30, 2021
Looking at them, we do not need to ask who the girl is who is looking back at us, worry-free. We know that she is our interior.
Just like many of the repeated elements in Lourenço’s work, the girl’s face is the result of a slow distillation. And I am not talking only about the evolution of this artist’s work, but the history of contemporary art. As Newton wrote: “If I have seen further it is by sitting on the shoulders of giants”.
The face of “Lourenço’s girl” is born of Picasso’s synthetic Cubism; the way he uses colour (just look at that Titian Scarlet!) has all the joie de vivre and philosophy of a Matisse filtered through a David Hockney. His extraordinary sense of composition, with the figures slightly shifted to the right, is inherited from Malevich’s suprematism, the feline touch comes from Balthus, and the depth of field from Cezanne—the first painter to reject the artifice of perspective and adapt to bi-dimensionality on the canvas.
We could continue describing the artistic DNA of someone who, like all artists, has not sprung up from nowhere. But most interesting are the elements that make him both unique and universal at the same time.
Look at his urban crowds: people toing and froing without looking at one another; some on foot, others on bikes, the odd dogwalker. They are geometricised figures, impersonal, each one for themself...yet despite that, this is a friendly work. Being able to go around the city doing your own thing, without worrying about the scrutiny of others (which is what happens in some small towns and villages) is an act of freedom. In fact, all modern democracies base freedom on the right to privacy.
And there is another detail which is not accidental: in some of these crowds we can see “Lourenço’s girl” on a bicycle, and she is looking at us. This is a resource used by the Italian Renaissance artists to establish a connection with the viewer.
No doubt you will ask yourself what is so private and personal about riding a bicycle? Lourenço can answer that: “If I look at the world when I am walking, everything is too slow and boring. When I’m in the car I can’t enjoy the view. For me, the ideal speed is when you are on a bike”.
I try to define the feelings that Lourenço’s work stirs in me, and all I can think of are the words of Pepín Bello, the great friend of Federico García Lorca: “When Federico spoke, it was neither hot nor cold, it was Federico”. That is the closest it gets.
- Ricard Mas, Member of the International Association of Art Critics
-
Campoamor, 2
43202, Reus
Spain
0666674996
Details
Didier Lourenço
Spain
Exhibitions in Reus
Anquins Gallery
Amb Veu de Dona
From March 11, 2024 to April 30, 2024
Anquins Gallery
Karlsruhe Art Fair
From February 21, 2024 to February 24, 2024
Anquins Gallery
Affordable Art Fair Brussels 2024
From February 6, 2024 to February 10, 2024
Anquins Gallery
RUI GOMES. Paradoxes del temps
From January 25, 2024 to March 1, 2024
Anquins Gallery
RAMON SURINYAC. Visual Matter
From November 30, 2023 to January 19, 2024
Anquins Gallery
Affordable Art Fair Hamburg 2023
From November 5, 2023 to November 8, 2023
Anquins Gallery
ALEJANDRO QUINCOCES: The sky, the sea and the city
From October 19, 2023 to November 24, 2023
Anquins Gallery
Amsterdam Afordable Art Fair
From October 30, 2023 to November 3, 2023
Anquins Gallery
Morató Aragonese The kaleidoscopic light
From September 7, 2023 to October 13, 2023
Anquins Gallery
JESÚS CURIÁ. Archetypes
From May 17, 2023 to July 13, 2023