When Jose Lerma encountered “Reception of the Grand Condé by Louis XIV” by Jean-Léon Gérôme on the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, he discovered himself drawn to the figures tucked far behind the group. Identified for his meticulous realism, Gérôme rendered these small characters with minimal brushstrokes, a choice that has influenced Lerma’s work for greater than a decade.
Exaggerating the sparse high quality of the figures, Lerma (beforehand) paints portraits in vast swaths of acrylic utilized with brooms and industrial instruments. The brand new works retain the contrasts of earlier items as well-defined strokes sweep throughout the burlap to kind heavy, impasto ridges.
At Nino Mier Gallery in Brussels, Lerma’s new solo exhibition Bayamonesque presents the end result of his present model. The title references his upbringing in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, and the way we take into consideration resemblance. Portray each actual topics and manufactured characters, the portraits reference those that would possibly in any other case be relegated to the background, stripping down their likeness to solely what’s needed.
Vacillating between figurative and summary, the compositions are what Lerma refers to as “the summary of a portrait…The abstract painter in me is, above all, drawn to certain people for specific features that can be broken down to their bare minimum as paintable elements: an expressive cowl, a striking nose, a distinctive shape of lips.”
Bayamonesque is on view from March 14 to April 17 in Brussels. Discover extra from Lerma on Instagram.
