Professor Paula Ramos PhD

An amorous dialogue

Lenora Rosenfield's poetics are the result of a long process of observation, research and understanding of the characteristics of materials and methods of painting; in this particular case, those related to the ancient technique known as fresco.

Largely not used today, frescoes (from the Italian, affresco meaning “fresh”) are mural paintings created from the application of pure pigments, mixed only with water, on a wet layer of plaster or lime. During this process, the colors penetrate that layer which becomes integrated in the support. Some of the greatest masterpieces in the history of Western art are frescoes, like the narrative cycle by Giotto (1267–1337) in the Scrovengni Chapel of Padua, the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo's (1475–1664) sublime creation in Vatican City and the radiant compositions of Giambattista Tiepolo (1696–1770) in the Patriarchal Palace of Udine. It was from the latter that Lenora extracted the image in perspective of a rebellious angel expelled from Paradise by Saint Michael. Reduced to a shape and contour, almost like a cartographic image, it is one of Lenora's main tropes, as she attaches, cuts up and overlaps fragments dozens of times in her own frescoes.

Lenora's frescoes, unlike those mentioned above, are not made on walls. Materially, they are the result of chemical experiments with modern materials used in civil construction, such as mortar and felt. As a concept, they maintain the same principle as the original technique: pigment and water are applied to a specially prepared support, transforming into a single entity.

For more than 15 years, Lenora has dedicated herself to a technique she has dubbed “synthetic fresco.” This investigative and artistic practice is in line with her activity as a painting teacher at the Art Institute of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, as well as with her earlier restoration work. She is a teacher and researcher who skillfully aligned her own body of work with her academic life, as well as more subjective interests, such as dance, the focus of the Movimento series.

Lenora became fascinated by body language around 2005, when she decided to learn how to dance or, as she puts it, “educate her body.” At the time, she had recently concluded her PhD in Fine Arts, bringing to the canvas the dimensions of her own body in a geometrical and seemingly detached manner. Observation of other bodies, this time in motion during dance classes, led to a radical change: from controlled and sterile shapes, inert limbs referencing a single body, she began depicting perfect, light and fluid bodies. These transfigured bodies emerge, repeatedly and in sequence, in a standardized space, some achieving discrete volume, as if trying to overcome the limits of the support. Arranged side by side, the quadrangular supports resemble the grids used in the perspectives of frescoes in churches and palaces from the Baroque period. We therefore return to Tiepolo and the beginning of this text, especially considering how the artists of the Settecento subverted the rhetoric of representation, exploring illusionistic effects and projecting their figures beyond the “frame,” whether the real one or the one established by architectural elements.

The poetics of an artist is usually defined by a cyclical nature of themes. In Lenora Rosenfield's case, it is the result of diligent observation, readings and studies, but mainly her introspective experience in the studio. It is in this alchemical environment that Lenora, through the quickness of execution required by the fresco technique, gradually frees her figures-- in other words, herself. She is always her own theme, from Tiepolo's fallen angel to a tireless dancer, in her fruitful and amorous dialogue with different times, techniques, materials and traditions.