Eva Llorens is a Spanish artist best known for her enigmatic paintings of objects, people and landscapes. There is a dreamlike quality to her paintings, they offer a sense of the familiar, testaments of daily existence and comfort, exquisitely executed.
Utilising the Japanese aesthetic of wabi sabi, Eva Llorens paints the transient beauty and natural aging of glorious blooms. There is a timeless sense of joy and hope these floral portraits evoke.
Rather than produce anatomical flower paintings, for Eva Llorens it is far more important to capture the quality, the feeling, and the spirit of the flowers. Her striking paintings symbolize a brief existence of picked plants and their fleeting beauty. The flowers are in glorious, exuberant bloom, or just past. Their furled forms animated by the abstract background of paint behind them. The surface feels still live with the artist’s touch.
Fascinated by the stems refracted through the silvery water, or by the poised bud of a lily, Eva paints something closer to a portrait than a still life. You can feel the thick darkness closing in around these lightsome white heads on their fragile stems. Flowers with the status of people.
The Japanese aesthetic is a set of ancient ideals that include wabi (transient and stark beauty), sabi (the beauty of natural patina and aging), and yūgen (profound grace and subtlety). These ideals, and others, underpin much of Eva’s aesthetic on how she paints and what she considers beautiful.
These paintings are meant to convey emotion and communicate directly to the recipient or viewer without needing the use of words. There’s a timeless sense of joy, hope, or even moroseness that paintings of flowers can evoke.
Sensatori - exhibition runs 2 - 21 July 2020.