Luis Lorenzana’s newest series, The League of Luminous Lunatics, is in part the product of an excavation, the artist digging up some old drawings and setting out to elevate these using powerful traditional methods. The result is a curious fusion of the lunatic and the noble that casts both components in a new light. The series puts on bold display a stark contrast between the dignity of old world portraiture and the whimsical distortion of its subjects that eventually – remarkably – softens and disappears
The figures that peer out of these paintings are not likely to be forgotten. Their faces are twisted into mad silhouettes; their flesh is folded, knotted, and stretched. Their skin is subjected to wild new geometries: prongs, spheres, holes, bulbs, curves and curls and loops. One of them sits, comfortably mustachioed, gazing out of a cratered skull, while another stares, five-eyed, at something unseen off-canvas. Their warped features, often doubled, tripled, or in some cases drastically multiplied, certainly arrest attention. But the greater surprise lies in the unexpected blending of these strange visages with ruff collars, formal postures, even a stray hand meticulously poised – the trappings of traditional portraiture in all its grave dignity.
Lorenzana did in fact find inspiration in the work of Rembrandt and the 17th century Dutch painters. Instead of simply emulating them, however, he saw in these paintings an opportunity for play and transformation: “They looked so perfect, lifelike, but too pleasing and artificial.” The League of Luminous Lunatics, then, might be viewed as his way of re-making the portrait, turning it into a platform for a more surreal, but no less resonant, glimpse at the aspects of human nature that are both hidden and unhinged.
But there is a method underlying this lunacy. One eventually moves past the alien contours, and into the dramatic working of color, shadow, and light. As the artist points out, “lunatics” were believed to have been subject to shifts in the lunar cycle. Both word and phenomenon are rooted in the moon and the havoc it wreaks on human forms and states of mind. In a way, Lorenzana’s newest paintings explore the implications of this etymology. His lunatics are rendered in black, white, and gray (though closer inspection reveals a host of muted hues) and brought to life by an otherworldly radiance. It is as if the artist has found ways to manipulate and position moonlight, channeling the old Dutch masters with a more mischievous eye and a more playful hand.
At first, these creatures seem rather peculiar subjects for what would otherwise be formal portraits. But the longer and harder we look, the more natural this meeting of the bizarre and the genteel becomes, and the more at home these creatures seem to be. Although their faces have been pulled and pressed in all sorts of startling ways, there is still something undeniably human about them. Their eyes, wide and alive, function as points of connection. These grinning faces might be read as coy, dapper, completely sincere, or downright insane, but ultimately, each one is welcoming, inviting the viewer to come closer.
Despite the whimsical title of his collection, Lorenzana tamps down on the notion of insanity as excess, striking a delicate balance. The madness is couched in formality, convention, and gentility, while the latter is mocked by the lunatic shapes traced, fleshed out, and illuminated in its subjects. Historically, the portrait was used as an exercise in self-promotion and picture making in more than one sense: the artist helped preserve the meticulously crafted images that the great and powerful wanted to leave behind. Lorenzana has transposed onto this canvas those facets of ourselves that we are less willing to bare: “those dirty mistakes, smelly secrets, bleeding bruises, ugly convictions and deformed spirits.”
Out of these shades, however, peek a delicate blue iris, a ruddy nose, a tinge of orange on white lace. The figures may be distorted, but they sit calmly for the artist and seem perfectly comfortable in their insanity, swayed, perhaps, by moonlight. It is tempting to conclude that the source of light is also the source of lunacy, but the radiance in these paintings comes more significantly from the faces that the artist brings beaming out of the dark. The series is luminous, after all, and all its lunatics are smiling.
Image: © Luis Lorenzana, Silverlens
