The Elements

Nancy Lorenz is an artist of light, singular in how she makes it spring forth from the combination of materials she elects: it streams from gold, silver, and palladium, it radiates from mother-of-pearl and lacquer. Her body of work, with its themes of aerial and aquatic phenomena, reacts to subtle nuances of sunlight, from sunrise to sunset, to the passing of clouds and rain, and to the phases of the moon as well. This concordance of celestial events illuminating work that represents these very events creates a unique sensation within the viewer.

A veritable repository of Eastern art – having lived in and learned ancestral techniques from the East – as well as Western, Lorenz synthesizes the cultures of the world’s poles like other artists of light such as James Turrell or Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Unison and harmony thus sit in the deep heart of her art.

As does beauty. Contrary to a tendency in contemporary art that mistrusts it, beauty does not frighten Nancy Lorenz – in fact, she celebrates it.

An alchemist who has made the periodic table of the elements into the matrix of her work, the artist tirelessly seeks to push further visually, to go elsewhere by the combination and juxtaposition of the elements. Lorenz adds movement to the equation in this new series. The light veil of Shadow Element (2024) undulates with the movement of air in the painting’s environment. Another new facet is a nocturnal radiance never before present in her work: fluorescence. There is chemistry at work in this piece: drippings of Oxygen, Silicon, Argon, Tungsten, and Silver propelled onto the veil interact endlessly with a sheet of lead behind them. This work in progress will modify the painting’s appearance for some time, giving shape to what the artist calls “ghosts.”

The artist welcomes accident and chance into the heart of her works of virtuosic mastery. The unexpected is life, and here it is the life of the painting. One can feel the vitality in Nancy Lorenz’s jubilant gestures – it is communicative. Her sometimes very sensual touch attracts touch, the gentle caress.

François Jonquet

October 2024

Translated from French by Jacob Bromberg