MONOCHROMEN | Abstracte collages
On a journey, with a desire for Paradis Retrouvé
Alisa Lim A Po
The Monochromen series consists of paintings in various media that are constructed like a collage in shades of one colour. They arise from Lim A Po's empirical observations abstracted into a universality of human behaviour and emotions. This coincides with her research into the boundary between abstraction and reality.
In the Monochromen series, Lim A Po searches for an ultimate intrinsic value, a pure presentation of the emotional experience. By choosing abstraction over figuration, recognisability falls into the background, giving free play for the viewer to let the eye wander through planes, shapes, and lines, both over the surface and into the depths.
The choice of a monochrome pallet builds on Lim A Po's colourful Elements series. Letting go of colour and opting for a defined palette concluded the choice to build up the Monochrome series from black.
This framework offers Lim A Po unlimited freedom in the interplay between light and dark, between surface and depth and between hard lines and organic shapes. The result of this freedom is to unleash the emotional world within the painting, with the aim of unleashing something in the viewer on a purely emotional level.
The works are anything but heavy, log or monotonous. They are optimistic works with a playful use of light and dark. It's about the gradations in between; these give depth, layering and movement.
Due to the organic form language, the work radiates a friendliness, at the same time
the lines and fragmentary images create a great abstraction. With this Lim A Po answers her search for a reduced concrete translation, in order to create a more objective and thus works that are open to interpretation and introspection.
The origins of Lim A Po's work lie in empirical observations, from her own world, human behavior, and the world around us. They are translations in which the traces of her individual contribution have been abstracted as much as possible to a general platform, and where issues about human behavior and emotions go together in research into the border between abstract and reality.
The Monochromen are abstract collages in which Lim A Po creates depth by combining techniques and materials such as acrylic, linen, paper, aluminium, brass, and foil. She turns them into cut-outs: painted canvases cut up into organic shapes. For Lim A Po, each fragment is an abstraction of what once was. The fragments await their transformation, to a conversion, a new world, which takes place on the canvas once all the fragments have found their place, and a new world opens. The result is very layered: optically three-dimensional with a strong sense of depth.
For Lim A Po, working in a collage technique is a play of assembling, disassembling and reassembling shapes, lines and colours, looking for symbiosis in the painting.
It is a labor-intensive process in which the phases funnel themselves, from a casual hand to a very precise dexterity. But in addition to this - almost compulsive - way of working, the entire process of creating, destroying, and building also gives Lim A Po a great sense of freedom; it is a starting point for something new, in which the artist has complete control.
The artist has a great sense of human vulnerability and mortality, the more so she cherishes life. With this optimistic slant she creates beautiful stories. They give access to new worlds or spaces where there is room for emotion, such as dreams, memories, and fantasies. They are poetic mixtures where dream and reality come together.
