“When words and prejudices evaporate, the silence of art seduces.” – Lorena Villalobos
The artist on her art...
Woods
From a very young age I was proficient at drawing, depicting the human form and objects in perspective with ease and facility. I guess it came naturally to me. As I grew and matured I found my
interests gravitating toward dance and music as well as the visual arts. I am convinced that these three disciplines arise from the same deep-seated human impulses. I also believe that the influence
of all three has become inseparable to my work as a plastic artist.
Though many artists' careers have a progression of a few starkly defined "stages", I personally have never striven to define my work in epochs or periods. Moving on to the "new" and abandoning the
"old" with some kind of a linear trajectory is a concept that is foreign to me. Maybe that is because I continually refresh my creativity by changing from one medium to another - oil on canvas to
watercolor, acrylics to original prints, carving to collage.
What can a serious artist do when feeling equally the call to create abstract as well as figurative works? For me, what I have discovered is a natural compromise attained by making my figurative art
"looser" and my abstractions more palpable. In doing this I involve my strong feelings for dance and music as well as my love of nature. I depend on the almost musical moodiness of color and the
textural "rhythms" in nature, often just at the edge of chaos, to make my work accessible. To transport the viewer and stir feelings, emotions and long forgotten memories and to attempt to
communicate something more and more intangible while at the same time, more and more personal. LOV
Thoughts on Lorena's ouevre from Carlos Francisco Echeverria - Writer, Art Historian and former Costa Rican Minister of Culture.
Fragility and strength in the art of Lorena Villalobos
The works of Lorena Villalobos are, strictly speaking, neither abstract nor figurative. It could be said that they are evocative, to the extent that they rely on visible reality to build intense and complex images, enriched by the artist's ideas and imagination.
They start from a kind of dazzle, from perplexity before the natural. It is a perception that does not stop at the forms, but rather goes beyond, to find the energies that move them and that make the painter's sensibility vibrate. Thus, her creations condense sensations and emotions that find an echo in our common interiority.
She is particularly interested in the changing, unstable and fragile character of the real. It is not strange, therefore, that she frequently resorts to scenes in which water is the protagonist. Mirroring and fleeting, obeying the mysterious order of its own laws, bordering on chaos at times, water is thus a reflection of time and life.
Superimposing strata, layers and fragments of the visible on paper or canvas, with a bold and coherent language of shapes and colors (with roots in Cézanne, Kandinsky and action painting), Lorena Villalobos presents us at the same time, paradoxically, with both the precariousness and the strength of nature.
Hers is an art in constant evolution, which decisively explores and deepens the paths that she herself is opening. Her recent works are traversed by a stormy, shaken and shocking energy, unpredictable like a hurricane. Therein lies their strange beauty. They are, without a doubt, among the most significant art creations that have occurred in our part of the world in recent times.
Carlos Francisco Echeverria
Cobalt Flower, oil and mixed on canvas board, 50 x 70 cm, 2020
"Fish", stone and plant material, found objects, 2013
Life-size soft sculpture entitled, Man
Reclining with Butterfly - Mixed media, 48 x 32 x 24 cms
Turtle Textile - Conceptual work memorializing the murder of a Costa Rican park ranger in service to protect the nesting turtles.
Print