Lobsang Durney
Lobsang Durney is a contemporary Chilean artist from Valparaiso, Chile, who currently resides in Barcelona, Spain. In his work, Lobsang focuses on painting post-apocalyptic surrealist worlds, where he mixes realistic and imaginary subjects and storylines.
Lobsang’s work is uniquely cinematic, with each work having its own storyline, its own context, its own protagonists and its own reality. His subjects are often biomechanical contraptions with images reminiscent of the Mad Max movie series.
Who is Lobsang Durney?
A visionary, surrealist painter who interprets with his brushes a symphony of colors. Valparaíso has big eyes that intimidate. It is an enchanted city. A recognizable Valparaiso bus, yellow and green, ended up in this unusual place. Despite this feeling of Revelation, the mechanics of life continues. The paradox of destruction conveys its message.
The imagination is not content with the limits imposed by reality.
It has the ability to create other parallel worlds. That is magic.
Lobsang has developed his own line: selected environments, elaborate staging, the transmission of a message, freedom of interpretation of that message emanating from the heart of Valparaíso. The message is definitely related to its Chilean origins but ultimately, outside of its context, it belongs only to the imagination of its spectator.
In his latest exhibition “Doble Estandar” ("Double Standards"), Lobsang raises the question of economic power that, at present, permeates all life experiences, unifying them. Optimistically, we give in to a schizophrenic exercise of consuming and being consumed. We move between impossible sincerity and false flattery, between the voracious eagerness of success or its weak simulation.
Suppressed bodies, demolished architecture, and the miseries and contradictions of the social corpus are revealed in the art of the exhibition. The artist has removed the veils, exposing to light a bizarre socioeconomic entity that, as Mark Fisher defines it: “infinitely plastic, capable of metabolizing and absorbing any object with which it makes contact". Lobsang's machinery alludes to a dreamlike detritus culture. Located on the periphery of degradation, organic-mechanical contraptions refer, as Burroughs says, to "a soft machine", in useless struggle against the entropic dispersion of its parts.
In his own words...
My experience with art began when I was a child. Encouraged by my mother and influenced by my father, a painter and screen-printer, I started working early in our advertising workshop. I went from being an apprentice to an active collaborator in the creation of graphic pieces, which made me learn this trade and take interest in painting, advertising graphics and reproduction techniques.
In my teenage years, I won multiple painting competitions, and this recognition motivated me to stay the course. I studied architecture in Federico Santa María Technical University in Valparaiso, Chile. I wanted to learn how to combine the creative capacity of art and scientific knowledge, two commonly distinct and distanced areas. The use of digital tools identifies my work, so I became familiar with the new techniques of representation, without abandoning traditional painting. I had the opportunity to give workshops and talks at prestigious universities in Chile. I have developed four important exhibitions to date, which are mostly related to the port city of Valparaíso, where I lived for many years.
2 artworks
2 artworks
