| Palmira Hernández de Lück’s recent solo exhibition at Broadway Gallery was entitled Enigmatic Sensuality, an apt title testifying to the powerful and captivating work on view. Reminiscent of the work of Georgia O’Keefe and Mexican folk art, Hernández de Lück’s striking paintings draw us into an enigmatic and sensual world of fantasy, seduction, and spirit. Displaying mainly acrylic-on-canvas paintings, the show included a variety of styles such as Surrealist figurative work, luscious quasi-abstraction, and folksy still lifes of flora and fauna. The tie linking Hernández de Lück’s work is her overwhelming sense of fluid organic shape and swelling curvaceous line work, and her succulent approach to applying paint on canvas. |  |
Jill Smith
Palmira Hernández de Lück’s recent solo exhibition at Broadway Gallery was entitled Enigmatic Sensuality, an apt title testifying to the powerful and captivating work on view. Reminiscent of the work of Georgia O’Keefe and Mexican folk art, Hernández de Lück’s striking paintings draw us into an enigmatic and sensual world of fantasy, seduction, and spirit. Displaying mainly acrylic-on-canvas paintings, the show included a variety of styles such as Surrealist figurative work, luscious quasi-abstraction, and folksy still lifes of flora and fauna. The tie linking Hernández de Lück’s work is her overwhelming sense of fluid organic shape and swelling curvaceous line work, and her succulent approach to applying paint on canvas. Color and form undulate in florid feminine compositions that depict subjects ranging from shimmering, blossoming flowers, to delicately rendered dream-like fairies. Whether it’s a luscious and rotund piece of fruit, or a fragile humming bird erupting out of a lily pad—transforming into a heart-shaped form as a symbol of spiritual and emotional liberation—Hernández de Lück’s strength of vision and personal style always resonate deeply within the recesses of the viewer’s heart and imagination. In the cases where Hernández de Lück allows her sensitivity to form and color take over, her work verges on pure abstraction. In fact, she achieves a seemingly effortless synthesis of abstraction and representation, presenting curvilinear contoured forms replete with subtle tone transitions of a variety of hues.
Evoking a celebratory joie de vivre, Hernández de Lück’s paintings are simultaneously poetic and fantastical. Emitting a transformative power, these works elevate the viewer to a higher plane of awareness. One favorite on view in the show was a quasi-abstract image of a pomegranate sliced open. Inside the juicy ovoid form, we see a bright crimson patch smoldering behind a sinuous ball of periwinkle, inviting the viewer to lick the canvas just to taste the tantalizing juice inside. In another image, mother-of-pearl-colored flower petals radiate toward an azure sky, almost begging the viewer to caress its willowy soft skin. A favorite among the more abstract works in the exhibition was a diptych entitled Icarus, depicting an organic blue-and-green undulating form spanning the expanse of two canvases, floating like an ocean wave or a serpent’s tail on a sea of fire engine red. Such images created a strong link to Hernández de Lück’s more representational work, in that the aesthetic style was always consistent and recognizable as a part of the overall series.
Lastly, the pièce de résistance: several images depicting dream-like female figures hovering in cobalt-colored celestial environments, or on geographic representations of the earth, that lead one to think of angels and a world filled with peace and human kindness. In Woman of the Atlantic, having noticed that the contours of the Atlantic Ocean described the curves of a woman’s figure, Hernández de Lück created an image of the universal woman emerging from the water like a diaphanous Venus, and reaching for the Dove of Peace. Similarly, in A Yearning of a Peace-Angel of the Atlantic II, the woman of the Atlantic is shown metamorphosing into an angel, the continents forming her spirited wings—in another visual plea for world peace. Most powerfully, in The Course of Time—The Woman of the Atlantic, the archetypal female figure holds a flowing enigmatic substance representing the flow of time, represented through shimmering and sparkling stars.
All in all, this exhibition was one of the best I’ve seen in a long time at Broadway Gallery, and left me feeling uplifted and enlightened as I stepped back out into the gritty New York streets, carrying a bit of Hernández de Lück’s ethereal charm in my heart and soul.
