In her current body of work Cecilia Lueza employs a serialization of geometric forms, ambiguous imagery, bold use of color, sensuous painterly flourishes and stark graphic elements to create paintings of seemingly endless scope that recall nostalgic reveries.

For “Dual Nature” Lueza’s recent solo exhibition at the Ormond Art Museum, the Argentine-born artist presented upwards of forty paintings, works on paper, sculpture and an attention-commanding installation that brought to mind the reinvention of the mural.

The exhibit also revealed the talent’s mastery of her craft, inventive imagination and deft ability to navigate beyond the confines of the two-dimensional to arrive at the three-dimensional in works combining the abstract and figurative.

Lueza propels her paintings into the realm of installation by arranging groupings of circular canvases that explode the frame-by-frame logic of the narrative. In her showpiece mural Travesia, everyday domestic scenes conspire to tilt otherwise banal images into uncertain scenarios infused with a sense of the ineffable.
Her tondos were displayed on a sprawling wall upon which Lueza painted the black silhouette of a young girl blowing soap bubbles at the far edge of the installation.

Lueza’s circular paintings depict toy paper boats bobbing on turbulent oceans. On one canvas, a solitary man is captured from behind staring at what appear to be the bars of an enclosure. In yet another, a young woman stands nude, her face obscured by her long flowing tresses. These and other images are interspersed among the ovals of black, floating bubbles the child at the margin has blown across the expansive composition.

Observed from a distance the mural evokes thoughts of childhood innocence, the vagaries of life, and as its title implies the long and winding journey to maturity. On a profounder level the deliberate fragmentation and obscuring of the image suggests the mistiness of memory, while the child’s visible breath might appear a spiritual representation of the moment of creation.

Lueza’s subtle interplay of positive and negative space here alludes that there is more than the mind at first can grasp in these enigmatic, mostly monochrome paintings.

In Wonder, a large oil on canvas dating to 2008, Lueza bows slightly in the direction of architecture with a self portrait in which the artist appears juxtaposed against the crisply patterned structure of a golden dome conveying the notion of a celestial vault, the refraction of light and the nature of perspective.

Here the figure is rendered in suffuse amber hues at the hard left edge of the composition. At an oblique angle, an opening in the dome reveals a bright azure sky from which sunlight filters through to dapple the artist’s pensive face in palpable streaks of sunlight. The painting, executed with an economy of color, distinguishes Lueza as a painter with full authority over her palette.

One of her notable series of paintings are from 2007 called “Revelations” which are saturated with expanses of industrial gray tones, cloudy edges and touched up with bright-and-airy candy-colored swirls of striping adding to their psychological tension. In these medium-sized canvases the figure of a nude woman, rendered in ghostly hues, appears suspended in space, her body knotted in fetal contortions or lying prone atop the swaths of starkly contrasting gold and red, geometric-ribbon patterns that appear not unlike flying carpets.

With a remarkable attention to detail, Lueza compellingly articulates every line, shadow and wrinkle. The curving of her figure’s bodies and the swirling, fabric-like geometric patterns echo each other perfectly until the woman’s image seems to become both a still life and sculpture.

One can distinctly experience how Lueza succeeds in evolving this concept forward in her sculpture Love Force from 2010 created from clay, urethane, paint and epoxies.In this piece she floats the nude, white figures of a man and woman against what appears to be a solar disc, painted across with fiery orange, yellow and red hues suggestive of heat and passion. The bright sunburst of color is contrasted by a churning tangle of monotone gray belts of color that weave over the disc as if suggesting a looming tempest. The sculpture brings to mind an ancient artifact evoking the myth of creation.

Although Lueza’s art is implicated in a whole network of cultural references, its sources remain personal above all else. It is this, rather than the vicissitudes of style, that delivers the jolt and marks her as an artist worth keeping an eye on.

Carlos Suarez de Jesus

October 2011

I

I

I

l