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Silvia Lerin | Flowers | Saturation Point, London, June 2025
Review by Laurence Noga
©Copyright Patrick Morrissey and Clive Hancock All rights reserved.
This is Silvia Lerin’s first one-person exhibition in the UK, held in the Saturation
Point project space. The works shape our interpretation of symmetry, movement, and
sources of light. The physically impressive diamond structures have a composed sense
of motion; the forms suggest a sudden unfurling. Lerín builds coherent spatial connections
and a sparkling luminosity, in an approach that feels both about causality and order.
The four bilateral structures in this exhibition develop Lerin’s Flower series, which
began in 2015. The pared-down colour choices work insistently through a symmetrical
and symbolic significance. Operating like a ship’s mast, the movement in the space
feels streamlined but also connects us through a sensory experience.
Lerin talks about her painting in a highly autobiographical way, and although her
inspiration is rooted in the English garden, you begin to read the paintings through
their perceptual organisation and hidden codes. You immediately appreciate the passing
of time, and a sense of decay, suggested visually through the variegated, mottled
surfaces and the differing weights of the canvas. The subject matter feels not only
contingent on the carefully calibrated oppositions, but also through contemplation,
and the sense of transformation that these works suggest.
These subdivided zygomorphic forms suggest a feeling of participation. We almost
feel invited to adjust the paintings, to look under each petal. But their mystery
is part of the game of possibilities that Lerin is asking of the viewer. Each of
the works is divided horizontally with a painted baton that splits the work structurally.
But this device also develops a feeling of mechanics, or growth, as though something
is about to happen. Lerin consistently brings the bottom half of the structure forward
slightly, through the warmth of colour in the baton, building a tension between the
organism/painting and its environment.
F-Begonia (2025), Acrylic on canvas and wood, 200 x 200 x 5 cm.
The raw material and surface implications build drama and presence in the structural
arrangement of F-Begonia. It is important to see these works from all sides; for
example, in the way the flap of canvas sits just away from the painting like a half-opened
letter. These delicate characteristics are subtly cantilevered optically into the
space. Lerin develops the painting through a sense of oxidisation, allowing the loose
surface handling of the brushwork to look ‘sanded back’, revealing the initial ground.
The surface dynamic and aged quality suggest the passing of time, like a yellowed
manuscript. We understand that this flower has been around for a long time, perhaps
kept as a memento.
F-White and Yellow Rose (2025), Acrylic on canvas and wood, 151 x 151 x 5 cm.
F-White and Yellow Rose draws our attention to the shade of whiteness of the gallery
wall, amplifying the tonal shifts within the painting. Indeed, Lerin could have made
the paintings for this specific space. The symmetry and balance between an impersonal
and a personal approach helps the paintings to work in an elusive manner. For example,
Lerin introduces a hidden triangle into this composition. The delineated and dramatic
cut calls to mind Richard Diebenkorn’s approach to drawing in opaque water colour,
acrylic, and graphite, in his Ocean Park series. Diebenkorn was drawn to the quality
of light in Santa Monica, California, and it feels to me that Lerin responds to light
and structural variation (maybe reflecting her home town of Valencia) by fusing both
the overlapping structural approaches with a more lyrical visual voice. Lerin directs
us towards that incision, to animate the scale and movement. The yellowish stain
(which pushes the triangle forward) appears to be casual, but feels integral and
technically important to the work.
F-White and Yellow Lily(2025), Acrylic on canvas, 151 x 151.5 x 4.5 cm.
Perhaps Lerin is suggesting here a purity or a sense of spirituality associated with
the Spanish for lily (lirio). On first glance, F-White and Yellow Lily has a more
formal composition. The coolness of this work, with its pure white triangle (which
hovers just in front of an off-white triangle) works sharply. But as we move in closer
to the abutted forms, we begin to notice the inner relief diamond shape as it visually
sinks behind the marbled surface of the bottom triangle. The dappled contrast and
the balance between the two sections brings to mind Mary Martin’s constructed approach
in Rotation MMI (1968). Lerin develops the work through the tonal relationships,
and the way the triangles emerge from a rectangle. I like the way she develops pockets
of shallow space and shadow.
F-Yellow Iris (2025), Acrylic on canvas and wood, 126 x 62.5 x 5 cm.
The decreased scale and poignancy of the colour choices in F-Yellow Iris work fantastically
well to balance the show. The diptych format has a strong sense of unity, particularly
in the way the smoother deep ochre acrylic is applied, contrasting dramatically with
the colour-soaked bottom triangle. I am drawn into the way Lerin builds a feeling
of simultaneous rigour and sensuality. On one hand, the canvas is slightly tilted
at the top and operates particularly strongly in suggesting something more tangible;
on the other, there is a constructivist aesthetic which deals with rationality and
order in the process and dynamic of the work.
Lerin’s practice often refers to the passage of time, and these works operate metaphorically
to suggest skin – our flesh – as flowers, enhancing the ambiguity between the work
and its context. Silvia Lerin’s approach operates in a kind of co-presence between
shape, the framing, and the way a field of colour operates, but it is the metaphorical
additions that shift our interpretation of these complex and ambiguous paintings.
All images courtesy of Silvia Lerin