Lourenço does not tell stories but appeals to spiritual states. His ubiquitous protagonists, sometimes comfortably settled on sofas, sometimes on bicycles, reveal a certain plenitude. This is the everyday plenitude of those who live in the present, the here and the now.
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
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