Earthly Delights

Lena Viddo

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Select paintings from Earthly Delights that address a water narrative. Lena's main body of work blends themes of pop culture and the natural world into allegorical commentaries in which I attempt to represent the ambivalence and discomfort I feel in relation to popular culture and the status quo. My list of concerns is long and I focus on narcissism, self interest, the tyranny of beauty and the idolatry of money and materialism. Her paintings address these concerns through human and animal interactions in a luxuriously stylized world of dark glamour, part-fantasy and part-natural landscape. Lena's paintings are cabinets of curiosity. They are or cryptograms where human characters stare back at the viewer with undetermined expressions of longing and curiosity; bewildered, bedazzled or bemused by the wonder and the horror that comes with life on Earth today. It is up to the viewer to decide. Animal subjects, domestic and feral, appear in many forms and roles spanning character types that run the gamut from antagonist to hero and all shades in between. The work depicts a focused reality not tethered to realism. It evokes a life on the edge of the incarnate, disturbing and entertaining all in the same show. Visually seduce her audience making the viewer see and then see again, the paintings are filled with symbolisms and references extending across huge territory. Lena Viddo thinks of her paintings as beautiful contradictions inlaid with hidden messages for the viewer to decipher.

Artist BIO:

Lena Viddo is a multi-media artist of Swedish-Colombian descent. She is classically trained and studied painting in Florence, Italy at the Accademia Di Belle Arti and design at the Polimoda. She received her BA from F.I.T. in NYC. Viddo’s work has been exhibited worldwide in galleries, museums and art fairs. Viddo currently lives with her family and works between two studios; Bushwick, Brooklyn and rural Vermont. Her painting, which can be described as focused reality not tethered to traditional realism, is informed by the natural world and draws from a range of cultural sources including literature, history, fashion magazines, news headlines, and advertising campaigns. She also takes inspiration from her studies of Taoism, Jungian psychology, philosophy and her work with plant medicine, psychedelics and the Sufi Ennegram system. Her newest body of work looks at the artist as shaman and mystic as a counterweight to a society where the idolatry of money and materialism prevail alongside a growing yearning for spiritualism and deeper meaning.