Criticism
An author with a personality that gathers human situations in textures of mental expression; a silence that can be heard, the memory that emerges from a free task, performed with ease that accumulates vibrations.
Magazine «El Punto», Madrid. 13 February 1988
It is a contained intensity that of his expressionism, it is the intensity of the balance of colors all strong but not resting, a «quiet expressionism» of colors related to each other with the strength that gives its own balance.
C. Centeno, «El Diario Palentino».
This painting is offered with some defined features of definitive achievements, about a technical firmness, whose insistence covers all the work exposed, repeating melancholic backgrounds, dark characters angulated by the brief drawing, mysterious heads wrapped in a rictus of sadness, things and objects inherent in this false environment.
It is a sober palette in tones, very diversified in shades, thinking painting concerned with intonation and rich in a scale of deaf values of greens, blues, blacks. Indefinite portraits in the darkness of a convulsed and torn atmosphere, hieratic figures that move in an isolated space.
Onda al Arte, Juan Navarro. May 12, 1987.
…And all this achieved with those two elements totally necessary to achieve a full, total and permanent painting: to be the owner of that which is called an own style that some painters achieve, as in this case, almost genetically and that many others never manage to possess, and, above all to dominate absolutely the color, to know how to strengthen it with its elective affinities managing with mastery all the ranges, especially the cyanics, and having as own beautiful violets, roses that remember the best
Miguel Ferrer, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Telmo. 1999.
In their painting there is no drama, no torture, only illusionism in an «illusory» attitude juggling the elements that enter and leave the space of the painting, then they doubt if they hide to emerge in a game as constant as surprising. He always builds a big window in the interior where he transforms himself one and more times, following the laws of a permanent experimental order.
If you were smaller, I know that you would have fun walking around inside your work, because you identify with it. Sometimes I have been there physically, and I have also hesitated to accompany you on that walk. I have seen you make the right decisions, as if the effort did not exist. The experience of the matter together with the color refresh every moment the brush leading to a good final result.
Teresa Sarto, Doctor of Fine Arts.
Lorenzo’s painting has a background of classicism that does not contradict the laws of modernity. It is classic (classic = living) because it accepts what is consolidated and uses it; it accepts what is current and filters it through its peculiar way of capturing in the environment.
The pictorial solidity of Lorenzo Gonzalez’s work comes from knowing how to take the safe -the connection with the eternal, the appeasement of the modern and the synthesis of the formal.
When Lorenzo Gonzalez paints characters he does not make portraits, because he does not want to individualize but to paint human archetypes, to express emotions always contained. In the same way, still lifes go beyond the mere description of objects and become instruments that express a certain way of understanding spatial relationships through, precisely, the most everyday objects.
We could continue to comment on pictorial aspects of Lorenzo’s work, but eternal painting is not easily explained, although it is intimately felt for its quality. To this introverted and comprehensive vision, we invite the viewers.
Elvira Diez Moreno, Doctor of Fine Arts.
How is Lorenzo’s painting? Free, loose, vibrant, fast, fruit of his current moment, perhaps the deepest and most fruitful of his career. But it is not a gestural painting, but an alchemical one, with the ease of the many hours he has spent painting. Nor is it sudden but provided with a chamber – meditation – so disguised that it seems to be effortless. Lorenzo paints like a weightlifter, so skilled in hours of training, that he lifts great pictorial moles -his paintings so weighted (that they come from expired weight)- with a smile on his lips as if he were lifting butterflies. So much for Lorenzo’s painting after his long journey.
When a painting by Lorenzo seems fresh and natural («if that’s what it has to be painted like that,» says the viewer), one has to realize how much effort has gone into that long journey so that things go smoothly without being noticed. In this trick (or better, in this work without trick), in this method (art also means method in the dictionary) this part of the good of the painter. He has dived so much, he has walked so much, he has tried so much (to try is to try so much), he has tried so much (to try is to vary until something is proved, well) that now it seems that his paintings are good just because, but what happens is that Lorenzo -easy and exercised- has achieved that care «just because», that disheveled seasoning (seasoning is kitchen and workroom) that was the goal of some classics, the final perfection -naturalness- that the master Horacio recommended to his readers.
Lorenzo’s painting, then, has achieved the personality that unifies it and the quality that distinguishes it with the subtle method of making the difficult seem easy.When some daring spectator falls into the temptation to think: «I would do this if I put myself», bind the males, refrain from daring and think that in each brushstroke (so why, so necessary) of Lorenzo, loose and spontaneous, in each conjunction of colors (so different but so united, so vibrant but so calm), and in each line (so agile but so tied, so free but so defining) there is a know-how that has involved innate skill and hours of exercises, corrections and meditations.Also the magicians do things that are impossible without being so. You just have to be an artist and sweat it out. And art has a lot of hard work in prestidigitation (fingers ready and expert, as the painter needs them), because deep down it consists of nothing more than taking out of the hat (of the mind and reality) the rabbit of plastic beauty.