Lorenzo Belenguer's work straddles the realms of sculpture, painting and drawing. In one area of his practice, he transforms metal objects into sculptures that evolve from the visual rhetoric of Minimalism and double as ‘canvases’.
Belenguer is like a hunter who trawls the city for found objects, sometimes sourced as locally as the back garden of the studios' church. The work is then dictated by his discoveries, which include steel grids, a mattress reduced to its mesh of springs, and blacksmiths' tools. These he reads as masculine objects. He intervenes with these structures by oxidising the metal elements in salt water or acids and dabbing them with paint of primary colours. This transforms how the objects are read, emphasising the points at which layers of meaning converge.
For example, the artist paints the cone of an old anvil a vivid yellow, thereby morphing it into phallic form. In "Homage to Pollock" a spring mattress becomes a three-dimensional, and strangely fluid, abstract canvas.
(review by Dr Kathy Battista, King’s College London, for the Florence Trust, 2007)
 

web:  www.lbelenguer.com

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