Lena Laguna Diel
El pueblo arde y el mar hierve
03.05.24-07.06.24


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.
        Her largest cyanotype is composed as a diptych and extends the wall paintings behind it. In the canvases, delicate line drawings emerge from the background, depicting seated figures. These anonymous people, whose outlines are only recognisable at second glance, are in contact with each other, but their communication seems to be swallowed up by a translucent blue veil covering their surface. This transparent layer is created by the gestural distribution of the chemical solution and forms a vibrant surface. The intensity of this colour distribution is interrupted by the superimposition of further floating elements: stylised faces move above the composition and hang in the pictorial space like fragments of thought. Although everything in the picture is connected, the figurative elements such as the shadowy figures or striking faces seem to be floating in a sea of blue. Despite their immediate proximity, there is no direct contact between them and each of the outlined personalities submerges and remains to itself.
       

(*1993 in Zurich) has been studying fine art at the Basel School of Art and Design since 2022. Her work has been presented in various solo exhibitions, including at SPP in Sankt Gallen (2024) and Malpaís in Barcelona (2024). They have also been part of several group exhibitions such as the Ketterer Kunst Masterclass Prize in Munich (2023), Gallery Ann Mazzotti in Basel (2023), Städtische Galerie Fruchthalle in Rastatt (2023), Kunsthaus Baselland (2022), Palazzina in Basel (2022) and Galerie Knecht und Burster in Karlsruhe (2019).

Text: Carolina Maddè
Photography: Nils Heck