Cerj Lalonde Abstract

Cerj Lalonde moves smoothly from the canvas to the camera, from computers to installations, producing and showcasing an extraordinarily rich and complex body of work created during the last 40 years. His purpose is to pursue a direct and, in each case, a different communication with the spectator.

His paintings, installations, photographs, video, and web pages are intended to function each in its own way, as an overt revision and critique of the contemporary art system, as they establish parallel dialogues between the artist, the public, and the curatorial values.

Cerj Lalonde, the painter

Cerj Lalonde works his painting with a conceptual approach, as an attempt to restate the validity of painting as a practice per se. His abstract language ranges from lyric abstractionist pieces to many personal interpretations of art history masterpieces, as specific reflections upon geometric abstract paintings like Malevich´s black square series, or Albers’ study of color, among others.

Lalonde holds many layers as an artist. His years of experience as a painter and thirst for art history and critique have helped him develop into a consciously literate artist. Formally, his domain of techniques ranges from drawing, printing, and primarily acrylic painting by means of a wild contrasting palette. But more than any type of formalism, Lalonde´s work is a strong statement about painting itself and how he approaches abstraction from a conceptual viewpoint. His paintings celebrate the power and meaning of color and texture, the imperative voice of contrast and stridence, and the millions of possible solutions for a white canvas. I also see in his artwork a psychoanalytical interpretation of art, and a curiously unintentional approach to oriental philosophy appears throughout his multi-sized body of work.

In many of his canvases, the presence of the square has been integrated as an element of equilibrium and unity to the soul of the artwork itself. Lalonde is specifically interested in the qualities of painting as a medium: “What Painting and only Painting can do”. Of all arts, painting is perhaps the most intimate and personal of art languages. It reaches the viewer in a final phase, in the gallery, or museum, or exhibition space.

In the meantime, there is a time frame between the moment when the artist finishes his work and it gets shown. This space of time is silence. It can be said that the gap between the act of painting and its way out of the studio has had Lalonde wondering about other strategies of approaching the viewer, the critic, and to challenge the art world as a system.