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CATHERINE LORENT AT THE LUXEMBOURG PAVILION: RELEGATION

Catherine Lorent: Apotheosis Ba-Rock, 2013
Catherine Lorent: Apotheosis Ba-Rock, 2013 (Detail)
Catherine Lorent works with an expanded Baroque concept of art that exposes the contradictions of the modern western way of life and questions dialectical thought. Her very practice undermines well-established categories, combining painting, drawing and sculpture with performance, music and theatrical stagings into visually and acoustically charged installations. Both, a visual artist as well as a multi-instrumentalist in her musical project Gran Horno, Lorent persues a multidisciplinary approach, which at first sight appears to pander to the current trend towards “event exhibitions”. But Lorent’s work is anything but superficial, transposing complex Baroque strategies for a sensual Gesamtkunstwerk into the modern age. Inspired or seduced by her mystical, hermetical work, spectators are often encouraged by its participatory components to give free rein to their own creativity and respond to the artist’s idea with a subjective reinterpretation.

The title of the sound installation shown at Ca’ del Duca – Relegation – refers to the longstanding rejection, or “banishment”, of Baroque in the history of art, nowhere more so than in Venice, where Late Baroque architecture was stifled in its development by “anti-Baroque polemics”. Contrary to similar Baroque-averse tendencies in the current Berlin art canon, Lorent’s work posits the formal vocabulary of Baroque, which is often dismissed as absurd, wasteful and pathetic, as a central reference point. Citing pamphlets from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Lorent, who holds a PhD in art history, appropriates Baroque iconography relating to concepts of the sublime, power and domination, while highlighting the absurdities and contradictions which Baroque artists themselves had been very much aware of. For binary models fall short of explaining the complexities of the world: good and bad or ratio and religio may be antagonistic concepts, but in reality they are closely intertwined.

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published in the official catalogue of the Venice Biennial:
IL PALAZZO ENCICLOPEDICO - THE ENCYCLOPEDIC PALACE (vol II, p 58)

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