In Beautiful Pain, Luis Lorenzana uses white to create a soothing emptiness, a space in which scars can be borne without danger or damage, and in which they are sources of beauty. His use of color is controlled, and it is more meaningful against such whiteness. Color evokes a sense of joy, even as it creates turmoil.

There is something extreme about the racks that fissure the human form, about the thorns that wind themselves around it, about faces sliced open and coming apart. But for Lorenzana, the seriies speaks of an "extraordinary joy." Instead of breaking the subject down, mutilation unleashes a wild, strange beauty. It seems as though there is something potentiating inside the wracked body: leaves and flowers bud among throns; they sprout out of the ground, out of the women themselves.

Lorenzana's mastery of conventional methods allows him to play around with what one might expect from traditional portraits, taking his subjects past their physical limits as human figures. There is a pristine quality to the paintings, even as the bodies in them are on the verge of coming undone: "The beauty here is that they are still impossibly alive," Lorenzana says. These figures have transcended suffering. The extraordinary joy is there and it is perhaps only through breakage that such ecstasy can emerge.