Verners Lazdāns

Verners Lazdāns mostly does painting. His works are populated by anthropomorphic forms (personages, figures, portraits), which seem to emerge from a surreal world without revealing their true essence or trying to accent specific details. The colour spectrum is highly reduced or almost totally monochrome, i.e. black and white, handing the main role to tonal relationships and colour layering contrasts, varying the pastose strokes with smoothing sweeps of the palette knife. The works can be interpreted as an idea about an invisible world or global phenomena we seek to discern, as well as a metaphor about the human/animal boundary, or as subconscious images which the artist sees diffusely through matte glass. The titles of the paintings, such as “Vientuļnieks” (The Loner) or “Novērotājs (The Observer), encourage the viewer to see anthropomorphic silhouettes in the works, and so for the painting “03042018” Lazdāns used a numerical combination instead of a name, which designates the date the work was produced. The title given to the work at its birth does not impose an interpretation, rather it preserves an air of mystery around the endless search for the meeting point between humans and nature.

03042018. 2018.