Lorien Suárez-Kanerva: Visionary Geometries

The series included in this exhibition are: Wheel within a Wheel (2003-2017), Fluid Flow/Elan  Flow (2016-2021), Breath of Life (2021-2), Beholder Paintings (2023), and Wooded Terrain (2021). Importantly, the artist's primary works refrain from engaging in computer mediation to  sustain simulation. Instead, 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 compositions 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  undeniable 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. 

Lorien Suárez-Kanerva was born in 1973 in Berkeley, California of mixed heritage,  Venezuelan and American. She and her younger brother had a childhood where her  love of art and of nature were constants. She settled near Caracas in San Antonio de  los Altos where she attended La Escuela Comunitaria, a private Spanish-speaking  school. At the age of thirteen Lorien and her family (her father obtained a doctorate  in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Berkeley, her mother was a  certified elementary school teacher) moved the United States, to Oregon, in 1986.  Suárez-Kanerva received her BA from UC-Berkeley focusing on Middle Eastern  and Latin American histories. Her graduate degree and post-graduate work in  European Constitutional Law, diplomatic relations and international business were  pursued in Leuven, Belgium (Katholieke Universiteit) and in Spain (Universidad de  Salamanca and ESADE in Barcelona). Since 2003, the artist has had solo exhibitions  in numerous galleries and has participated in group shows at profit and nonprofit  venues such as Gallery 128, Lichtundfire Gallery and Anita Shapolsky Gallery, in NYC;  La Sierra University Branstater Gallery; Riverside Art Museum, San Diego Art  institute, Oceanside Museum of Art, in CA; Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton  Museum of Art, Art Basel Scope Miami, Curator’s Voice Art Projects, in Miami, 57th Venice Biennale, Palazzo Bembo, 2017-22. The historical influences that informed  Suarez-Kanerva’s aesthetic vision include Islamic art and architecture, East Indian  mandalas, the Rose windows of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral, geometric and  organic formalism, constructivism, and the aesthetic movements advanced by the  Bauhaus, the Abstract Creation and Blue Rider groups, the Latin American Geometric  Abstraction artists of the early 20th century. Artists Sonia and Robert Delaunay,  August Herbin, Carlos Cruz Diez, Jesus Raphael Soto, Joseph Stella, Stanton  McDonald-Wright, Archile Gorky, M.C. Escher, Johanesss Itten, Victor Vasarely,  Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, Charles Arnoldi, and Roland Reiss  are key progenitor-figures for her. The artist draws her inspiration from a range of  reading sources such as Carl Jung, Teillard de Chardin, Namgyal Rinpoche, Walt  Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, William Woodsworth, Lawrence Cahoone’s, The  Orders of Nature, and Jane Bennett’s, Thoreau’s Nature, and Philip Ball’s, Patterns in  Nature and Bright Earth.