When painting is a conscious party

On the current work of Victoria Llorens
 

Victoria approached painting in 2005 as an autodidact. Later, she met Jorge Demirjián (1932-2018), who after painting alongside her for 10 years, became her teacher.

Then, Victoria recognized the ambivalence existing in any well-accomplished work: though rigor is indispensable, there is always fun, enjoyment and delight involved in the production of any work. They are complementary elements, essential for creating.

That rigor in the form and procedure can be seen in the color palette, which is always the result of a conscientious selection of colors other than those which come directly from the tube.

There is no room for laziness, there is no room for error. The dimensions of Llorens' work bring everything to light. Any detail out of place, any vacillation will be revealed; thus, it becomes clear that for Victoria, painting is a conscious party, a rational and premeditated celebration.

In some cases, defined designs can be detected, which, frozen at the very moment they lose stability, may refer us to the beginning of a disaster. Of polished forms and refined plans, these designs may evoke models, laboratory tests caried out virtually to speculate on the results of an event of such dimensions in the real plane.

But in other cases, it is difficult to identify shapes and relate them to everyday objects or structures; then, we can think of her painting as moving from the micro to the macro -showing us scenes as observed from a long distance and, at the same time, as seen through a microscope-, and also, from figuration to non-figuration. In this unconflicted flexibility, the artist feels at ease.

Those bodies, which progressively developed a personality of their own, have recently started to ask for matter. They no longer want to simulate their three-dimensionality, they want to possess it tangibly. In this new stage, then, the artist expresses her work in the object plane, or rather as installations striving for survival amid texture, color and volume.

As David Hockney put it long ago, it is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work. Victoria's work exists and can be thought as a party to which we are all invited and in which it is certainly possible to believe.
 

María Lightowler
Lluvia Oficina of Museology and Curatoship
November 2018