El pueblo arde y el mar hierve

The exhibition by Swiss-Spanish artist Lena Laguna Diel transforms G10 Projektraum into a blue, melancholic world. In her installation, she combines drawing, painting and digital elements in deep blue cyanotypes whose motifs seem to float in space like dreams. Laguna Diel deliberately turns away from traditional painting techniques and fills her canvases with the colour tones created through the photographic printing process. The resulting wall objects hypnotize the viewers and drag them into an abyss of an endless cyan-coloured world in which human figures, faces and hands co-exist. Lena Laguna Diel applies a complex artistic process to produce her works: First, she draws her compositions, scans them and digitally processes parts of them. She then uses her assembled collages to create sometimes huge, sometimes small negatives. When she places a negative in a basin with a chemical solution over a piece of canvas, the textile turns blue. The artist harmonizes this chemical process of cyanotype by creating various translucent layers through the combination of the negative and the substance. This results in complex compositions without a clear foreground or background; without even a horizon or perspective. For her exhibition in G10 Projektraum, the artist breaks with the classic concept of pictorial composition; she draws abstract forms directly onto the wall and thereby expands the pictorial space. The walls thus become an active part of the exhibition. The activation of new pictorial levels, the blurring of boundaries and of artistic techniques gives her works depth and a melancholy tenderness that vibrates subtly and yet powerfully through the space.