"I have always lived in anguish, at once recognizing the absurdity of our condition and meeting the difficult challenges of reality.  Reality has, since childhood, shown me a great deal of suffering.  In this, I suppose, it motivated me to turn inward.  I paint a persistent search, one which I hope at every step illuminates.  It is my conviction that a mystery abounds- I seek in my work to strip humanity of its supposed nature and restore to it its mystery.  That is my aim:  to formulate an aesthetic of the absurd, bringing to light the tragic insignificance of our complex experience, which nevertheless never seems to me anything less than sacred."

-Lucero Gonzalez Jameson

Born in Mexico City, Lucero Gonzalez Jameson is a New York City based painter.

LUCERO GONZALEZ

That painters are reluctant to write about their art is a truism. They recognize that the art speaks in language defined by color and form while words are merely an indirect transliteration of their intentions. If, in fact, they could effectively make exact verbal equivalent to their pictorial statements, they might quite easily substitute the computer or at least the ballpoint pen for the brush and the easel. Some painters, to be sure, are more readily prepared to verbalize about their artistic statements: after all certain pictorial expressions are predominantly literal. Such is hardly the case with Lucero Gonzalez. Quite to the contrary, on all counts, her paintings are decidedly remote from literary parallels.

On the other hand, after constant urgings and with an eye to the historical record, Gonzalez prepared brief remarks which are helpful for approaching her unique creativity and offering suggestive insights into the motivations upon which they are based, and the human quotient that underlines their meaning.

“Since I was little I felt anguished by the absurdity of the human condition. I have always been in search of the essence of human beings. I paint humans, which are not necessarily male or female but beings on earth. I paint man in order to discover his soul, in an effort to remind everyone that what is in the exterior does not matter, that is, it is the inside of man, the soul that counts for me. My rejection to paint in a realistic manner is due to my non-conformity with the reality I have faced since my childhood. I live in constant existential anguish and I’m compelled to express the complexity of my experience.”

This statement is remarkably direct, unaffected, uncalculated, open and honest as are her paintings. In a day when agendas dominate, there are no secret agendas in her anguished statement, no compromises, no self-conscious programs. She fights her battle, which is also our battle, everyday, beat by beat. The results are a brilliant and fascinating series of hauntingly glowing paintings. The images slip in and out a shallow netherworld on the rim between the here-and-now and another dimension.

Art Scholar and Critic

Professor James Beck

Columbia University

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