By Dan Aldo
The main subject of remarkable portraits by Lone Bech showed recently at Artifact is a human condition of her subjects. Indeed, the strong expressionistic impulse in the artist’s paintings and collages make them immediately recognizable as well as intensely realized. It is worth devoting some time to look at the structurally sound pictorial strategy the artist employs throughout her work. She translates the essential shapes of bodies and faces into figurative improvisation. Thus, her formal innovation offers us sensations of imagery that is simultaneously new and profound.
Bech’s subjectivity allows a certain element of visual play and tenderness to penetrate in and within her pictorial passages. The liquid, floating sensation which opens our eyes to different possibilities in terms of spatial depths, to both figural and figurative references in her work is a direct result from her “as-if” creative mindset. This accessibility to all levels of the psyche is visually insinuated by the artist’s applications of texture and color.
Her visual references suggest not only the poetic lyricism that floats to the surface of her works. It also infers the artist’s probing into her unconscious, a submersion in the deepest part of her creative waters. It results in a subsequent retrieval of psychic energy magnificently reified in material form through paint, paper and canvas.
Dan Aldo is an art critic and a regular contributor to Artery.