The Pablo Guerrero Gallery’s exhibit of ten abstract canvases, marked by their shades of white It’s been awhile since artist Lorenza Aranguren has shown her work in Guadalajara’s exhibit spaces. She’s taken two years to think, write a lot, reflect and bid color adieu, abandoning above all the range of reds so evident in her last series. What’s resulted from this introspection is an exhibit of ten oils and encaustics, opening tonight in the Pablo Guerrero Gallery under the title of Silences. "Most people identify me with my highly-colored work, but I had the need to make something different, putting color aside (it was getting too ‘noisy’ for me) and delving really deep inside: which led to work that was more polished, cleaner color-wise,” says Aranguren, who in some of these pieces includes a daring brushstroke of red, or one or another shade of yellow.
The origin of the Silences series dates from about a year ago, when the artist began painting a canvas entitled ‘The vulnerability of whiteness’: until then she’d never used the ‘absence of color’ so exclusively. “This work turned out to be an incredible battle,” she recalls, for while she began with various shades of black she found herself scraping and scraping, “and I spent like four months doing this canvas, until I finally touched down. I worked really hard, scraping off and painting back on, over and over. I was adding more white, different tones of white, and it wound up being a virtually all- white canvas. And that was great, because when I looked at it in the afternoon it had a different look from what it had in the morning, or when I lit it with halogen bulbs.”
The title of the show is the result of a yearning Aranguren had then, “to give voice to the silence I had within, as if speaking of what arises in silence, a look, a handwritten letter...many things can lead you to hearing silences.”

Faithful to abstraction

Nearly two decades ago Lorenza Aranguren gave her first solo exhibit of abstract art, a style from which she’s never disengaged herself. Far from imitating reality through figurative art, what interests her is expressing subjectivity through her paintings, her artist’s inner realm; managing at times to directly transmit feeling through unrestricted color mixing, immersed in forms and brushstrokes that relate freely among themselves.
“The abstract entertains me, I like it tremendously, it keeps me going. It’s an endless search, for sure. Within the figurative you’re always going to be limited, while abstraction is an ongoing quest: though it’s harder, and more complicated because you want to find strong balance, or sometimes a bit of nothingness. I like it a lot. I’ll definitely keep at it forever,” she says.

Installation

Silences is Lorenza Aranguren’s second solo exhibit at the Pablo Guerrero Gallery; the first time it was an installation she titled Enclosure. That consisted of 31 small acrylic houses, each interior holding a wrinkled piece of note paper with someone`s thoughts on how life felt early last May in Jalisco’s capital, when an influenza outbreak forced suspension of masses, restaurant and bar closures, obliged soccer games to be played without onlookers and caused nearly total paralysis of programmed cultural activities; all due to the health emergency. “By tucking the different opinions and thoughts people had inside houses, I convey the idea that we’re under lock and key in our homes. This installation also speaks quite a bit about eloquent silences, silences that say a lot,” the artist notes.
‘Enclosure’ is reflected in several of the works here too, as Lorenza Aranguren, by including a tiny house, gives a wink and a nod to figurative art.