Lorien Suarez-Kanerva

Suárez-Kanerva’s visionary geometric artworks have an auratic hand-made quality that revels in inducing a variety of facture for the viewer. This is the combination of brushworks, marks, material and the texture of the surface. Much of the fascination and excitement that accrues to the artist’s manual media comes from what the viewer can observe at close range which in turn induces a range of sensations within the viewer, including delight, wonderment and mystery.

 Lorien Suárez-Kanerva nimbly applies the language of geometry to compose her layered abstractions. The visual compositions are a result of a constructive, systematized pictorial language allowing the planning of these compo- sitions to take form and shape following a pre determinable organizational matrix. This organizational, structural level inherent in a geometric matrix affords visual coherence and excitement to the artist’s dynamic narratives as such. But for Lorien Suárez-Kanerva geometry is part of a perceptual matrix. Geometry applied as a language of form allows the artist to use it as a language of content. Over the years Suárez Kanerva has masterfully structured (operationally and pictorially) the creation of internally coherent compositions that are imbued on some levels with clarity and precision. Yet on other levels such compositions and the narratives they suggestively provoke also defy easy reading, resisting interpretation and thus heightening the vitality level of her studio practice. One of the unde- niable attributes of Suárez-Kanerva’s studio practice is that she has managed to introject into each of her carefully calibrated compositions a pervading sense of intense, ecstatic unknowingness. The perfume of radiant enigma permeates her aesthetic vision which is imbued with vitality.

Such vitality stems from the artist’s capability, honed after years of experience, of keeping her process alive to spontaneousness and improvisation. Lorien Suárez- Kanerva’s imaginative and creative impulses have been inten- sified by drawing upon what she knows, what she has experienced, physically and sensorially as well as cognitively through her research and study. But, importantly, the artist has learned to allow a vision to take hold by attending in an uninhibited way through consciousness to what lies beneath normal everyday awareness. That vision integrates the materialistic and the immaterial while inferring the presence of metaphysical or transcendent truths that embody her actual physical artworks. Such impactful metanarratives suggest the presencing of worlds beyond language. They point to a primordial, ahistorical awareness that Maurice Merleau-Ponty alludes to in his Phenomenology of Perception when he states: “To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge of which knowledge always speaks.”