Lorenz Sonneman

My attempts at art are a response to our virtual and irreverent American aesthetic. Each picture embraces the beauty in a human grossness overwhelmed by mindless forms and dichotic alienation. Ours is a generation sustained by displaced attention and a pixellated reality drifting towards a druggy nightmare. Globalization has uprooted responsibility and enabled externalization for short minded, abusive ambitions. My characters mirror our overstimulated experience, are melded with allusions of consumerism and suspended beliefs, in an allegorical dive to reveal our nihilism. Art is not a commodity, but a power that makes us chant and dance or cry out for a visual truth. To ostracize what is most original and pure to our reality, to forget that we tremble in the wilderness or that our appliances pass through the hands of a thousand unsung workers, leaves us empty, disconnected. My odd figures pronounce that, without close attention, life will be artificial.

Most of my abstractions are divorced of linear storytelling and act instead as echoes of an idealized concept, opinion or relationship. I acknowledge that the fragments of my experience can appear unintentionally (like in all artmaking); they reveal my own history, an imperfect l...

Green Chalk Gallery, Montery — 2013