Clara-Lane Lens presents her genderless series 'They never used to talk much'

How much translation is needed to identify relationships? How does one expose the connection between word and image, between an everyday reality and imagination? The figures in Clara-Lane’s paintings seem frozen in their actions – as young painterly souls absorbed in thoughts – yet, the stillness is deceptive. In this exhibition, they take the lead.

Clara-Lane Lens asks friends and acquaintances to model for her paintings, as well as strangers in a club or on the street. She selects people based on specific traits or characteristics that stand out. Just like one falls in love – by a look, touch or gesture – she highlights exactly those fragments that characterize someone as him- or herself.

‘They never used to talk much’ (Genderless Series) shows us a series of works, created during her time in Berlin, the city par excellence where everybody seems engaged in a quest for identity. Yet, this subject is subtle, indirect. Rather than raising awareness, Clara-Lane evokes an atmosphere. Any indignation about the position of minorities remains covert.

Is she painting a chronicle of her generation? After all, androgyny is a contemporary buzzword. However, the depictions on her paintings are too blank for that. She tells a story, but only through few sentences and fragments.

Clara-Lane paints using a classic imagery. Her works veers between the directness of a quick snapshot and an extensive study of the human body. All figures look alike. They all share something similar, beautiful but introvert. They are inward-looking, lost in thought. But there is also a kind of physical absence. She deliberately omits the characteristics that could reveal a character’s gender. Spectators are regularly misled, yet precisely that’s the attraction in her work. As you are left with the sense that something has eluded you.

Androgyny is something that is physically recognizable. Both abstract and descriptive, soft and hard. The figures show us something else than purely masculinity or femininity. Clara-Lane grants them a new identity, which she only encounters while painting. The paintings are as androgynous in their physicality as they are in their identity. Each work is as much a portrait of a dear friend, as an icon of gender fluidity, as the artist’s imagination. This is voyeuristic fascinating on the one hand, anonymous at a distance on the other.

This series of paintings is intimate. You can tell that it was never the intention to see these figures, as if they were persuaded.

Clara-Lane painted them in intimate places, where they already reveal a bigger part of themselves. Physical thresholds have disappeared. How close can you get to the paintings? But just as much: how close will they let you? The characters show themselves in a place where they are seemingly both at their most vulnerable as well as at the height of their power. Delicate but cherished.

Astrid Vereycken, 2021

Read about it in Bruzz

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