'The English Bed' by Guillermo Lorca
Brief painting analysis & artist insight. Circa 2020, presumed.
Born in 1984 Santiago del Cile, Lorca held his first art-show ‘Diebushka’ in 2007. He’s starred in a Cannes Festival-previewed film ‘Summer of the flying fish’ in which he plays himself. In 2018 he hosted a solo art-show at the National Museum of Fine Arts, titling ‘Nocturnal Animals’.
Lorca’s works is spattered with traces of Baroque and Renaissance influences; consistently portrayed with a majestic allure — poised on a fine line between erotic, mystifying, and violent. His paintings give off the same vibes found at a crime scene; igniting the sense you’ve walked in on something despicable or unsavoury.
It should be noted that this dissonance of his work is the very essence that translates into a renowed artistry that’s elevated his name in the world. Essentially, he paints nightmares and fever dreams — all of which poises itself with the unmistakable mark of beasts and femininity.
Lorca has admitted a driving force in his creative expression is his struggles with paranoia (born from an early age). Lorca suffers from anxiety and a persecution complex; both of which spur a complicated outlook and relationship with death. I personally interpret his work as restrained chaos. It is desire and inhibition.
If Lorca were a woman, I would claim his use of girls to be empowering instead of exploiting; that his intent was to depict the unrestrained wilderness buried within all women. But I can’t guarantee that he isn’t another artist that partakes in the victorian-born culture of art depicting female malady and ruin as something innate.
In this piece particularly, the themes of desire, and inhibition, comes in the form of being toyed by the cheetah. Again, it feels like stepping into a foreign dream — one that should’ve been kept under lock and key. The girl is helpeless and merciless to an impending suspense only one brushstroke away; restrained and bound to whatever fate has been pre-decided for her. You feel hopeless and unnerved when you look at her. And she stares back, knowing her reality.
On a personal standpoint, I feel that this painting depicts the world’s tendency to toy and play with women before eating them whole: A notion that many women have to live around in knowledge and practice. Our failure and shortcomings are not only anticipated, but people hold their breath and envision it like a dirty secret. We’re declared frail at birth in a world so destined to keep us that way. Yet it’s sour in your stomach when she looks you in the eye with the knowledge you’re watching her be torn to shreds. Women grow up fighting to get well in a world that wants them sick and immobile.
p.s. There’s something that can be said about choosing to place a mirror in the painting 🤭 So do with that what you will
Hope you enjoyed :) Lorca’s works can be found here: guillermolorca.cl/portf…