Incredibly talented painter Christine Lafuente recently mounted a must-see solo exhibition at Morpeth Contemporary in Hopewell, New Jersey, featuring stunning landscapes, cityscapes, and still lifes.
Viewing the colorful works by Christine Lafuente isn’t just a process of aesthetic appreciation, but a journey into the creative experience of the artist. Forms that are solid seem to merge and dissolve together in Lafuente’s paintings, creating an outstanding sense of movement, emotion, and abstraction.
“Often while painting, the forms and spaces I am looking at begin to merge,” she writes, “and all that had seemed so distinctly separate becomes simply a field of tone. There is air in the trees, there is water in the air, edges are lost, near and far coalesce. Glass reveals itself by what it is not, reflecting and refracting what surrounds it. In a seascape, the tones of water and sky are only known in relation to one another.”
Lafuente’s words describe beautifully her approach to the canvas, in addition to the resulting picture. While her forms merge and — at close inspection — become imperceptible, at distance our brains pull the representation back together in a lovely play of give and take with the art.
Continuing, Lafuente says, “Painting by natural light, there is a fragility to the appearance of a scene. For a brief moment, I can see a painting composition so clearly, the light as solid as stones — but like a kaleidoscope, the slightest movement and the whole thing shifts. Even in the cityscape, the sprawling steel, brick, and concrete arrangements of human striving lose their solidity and discreteness in a bath of warm afternoon light. It becomes something else, a musical score of gold pink notes rising from the grey soup, or the tide coming in to disguise and submerge an expanse of sharp granite Acadian rocks.”
“Light, Solid as Stone” opened on December 3 and will be on view through December 31. To learn more, visit Morpeth Contemporary.
This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.
