Luz Severino

Born in 1962 in the Dominican Republic, Luz Severino studied at the National School of Fine Arts in Santo Domingo and civil engineering.

She works on canvas and handmade paper. Her technical mastery gives strength to her unique pictorial universe. Her colorful pictorial identity is deeply influenced by Dominican culture and society, which have become her sources of inspiration. In a neo-figurative gesture, the artist seems to never finish her work. Each corner is transformed into an endless canvas.

Luz traces and paints vertical structures that can be found in many of her later series of works, which mainly depicted figures or even characters. Here, these verticals punctuate the entire surface of the paintings and draw the eye into a perceptual rhythm close to Op art or Kinetic art.

Surrounded by colored threads, these tree-like stems and trunks move and obscure the background of the painting, which most often depicts dense trees. The trees depicted are one of the most symbolic and widespread themes. The philosopher Mircea Eliade distinguishes seven main interpretations, which he does not consider exhaustive, but which all revolve around the living cosmos in perpetual regeneration.
Indeed, trees, understood as real subjects, are sociable entities, distinct in their volume, colors, and medium. The entire work intertwines to forge links and communicate together like a living family.

More than a denunciation of the climate emergency in which we live, Luz Severino uses her mediums not in a dramatic way, but rather to highlight the power of trees and their infinite interaction through the colors she uses, notably an omnipresent white, the color of purity, enhanced by colored threads sewn in, like Ariadne’s thread.