Today we talk about

Lawrence Fodor

His production in art is too vast to be reduced to few lines of comment.

We would like today to concentrate only on his paintings leaving for other occasions the wall sculptures, the photographs and the monochromes.

A dramatic sense of the scene; everything is always strength and power for Fodor. The incredible reinterpretation of giants of the past from Delcroix to Vermeer rendered through a process of copying the authentic work and then deleting any figurative reference to reach the very essence of the work through the overlapping of a layering of only color and glazes.

Everything is reduced to the essence. Fodor traces the entire history of art in a single work from the old past to the present and immediately, to where with abstract expressionism, the only true expression of feeling is given by the brush stroke and the color. A leap of centuries of art history enclosed in a canvas.

A gigantic operation if we want to say it all and a courageous one, perhaps even a little ambitious in terms of comparison and solutions. But the Fodor operation tends above all to accentuate the single fragment: that fractal work that becomes essential for the artist and that perhaps was essential also for the original artist. Access to the whole work is performed in pieces, stumps, fragments of the whole.

Not to be underestimated for the visual enhancement of the work is the brushstroke technique that seems to fall from above in a path of physical fall of the color that accentuates the emotional and dramatic aspect.

The color that “falls and slips” from top to bottom seems to have no brakes like a curtain, a veil, a compact shade that protects the original work and prevents access.

“Noli me tangere” seem to suggest his works.

The essence of things, and that of art, not lie in the identification of a reality that we already know, but in the exploration of the unknown and in the ability to see beyond the surface, letting own self be carried away by emotion. It is not what I see that excites me, but what I feel.

PAINTINGS

HIS WORKS

Lawrence Fodor began the pursuit of painting when he was 10.
He studied at Orange Coast College and received a BFA from Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, California where he also did graduate work towards his MFA in printmaking and painting. He has studied, traveled and lived in Europe, Asia, Central and South America. His work is exhibited and collected extensively in private and public collections including the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico and recently by the Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, Texas, among others. In addition to a studio art career as a painter and printmaker he has done curating and fine art consulting, residential design and construction, graphic design, gallery management, set design and production for live theater.

He has worked and had studios in Los Angeles, Long Beach and Santa Barbara, California, Kathmandu, Nepal, Tucson, Arizona and Santa Fe, New Mexico. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Maintaining studios in both locations, his work includes painting using oil, alkyd resin and cold wax on canvas, panels, and wood boxes, monotypes, watercolors, other works on paper and photography.

VIDEO

HOLDING LIGHT