Aerial View: The Art of Lance Dehn�
By Annie Poon
Lance Dehn�’s abstract paintings are playgrounds for the imagination. His liberal use of color and rich visual vocabulary attract the attention of art enthusiasts around the world.
Dehn� was born in 1960 on an air force base in California. As a youth, he wandered the bases and examined the planes. He haunted the machine shops and examined the parts on display there. He remembers spending hours in the machine shops scrutinizing individual components and noting each humble part’s inherent potential and function. Some components were spinners, some were sliders, some parts clicked while others turned. He touched and admired the little parts, wondering at their perfect ability to perform specified tasks. This childhood obsession developed into a longstanding fascination with aviation and machinery. At the same time, he began working on his first drawings, which were intense pencil studies of airplanes.
As Dehn� moved with his family from base to base, airplanes continued to surround him. Lance fell easily into a career as an engineer. He learned fabrication and design and even purchased a plane of his own. Then, he says, in 2000 an idea "hit him over the head." He started making paintings inspired by the moving parts that he had seen on the air force bases.
Dehn�’s paintings are not merely representations of specific components. Rather, he focuses on expressing functionalism and kinetics. According to Alberto Giacometti, "the object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity." In an effort to do this in his work, Dehn� turned to abstraction and developed a codex of shapes to act as surrogates for machine components.
The paintings hardly indicated the presence of a machine. Instead, the fit masses together to suggest human forms. His work burst into color. Pulleys, slots, levers and joints interact with brightly colored planes of color, generating a dazzling puzzle effect. He introduces a sense of freefalling into the pictorial space by layering the planes of color and intermingling them with painted shadows. The mechanisms take on a gently malleable, mouse-nibbled quality. Dehn� calls the resultant body of work his ‘Plateism’ series.
Lance also draws inspiration from his work as an engineer. He has mixed feelings about his blueprints, which he drafts laboriously to perfection. He refers to drafting as a ‘hair-pulling’ process. Once the drawings are finished and have served their original purpose, Lance recycles them into backdrops for his fanciful abstractions. Remnants of the drafted line combine with organic forms to create a delicate constellation effect reminiscent of Miro.
Formerly, the figures from his paintings were outfitted with moveable elements but looked cumbersome, even immobile. The highly detailed systems looked as though any motion might tip the work out of its delicate balance. His forms appeared frozen in an anxious state of hyper-functionality.
In his recent series, the artist has made a move to simplify his images. He has begun to pare his forms down. His focus seems to have shifted from the figures’ inherent functionality to their placement on the canvas. A visual tension has been added to the work, with brightly colored balls hovering precariously on the painterly surface.
Some of the drawings have the charged alertness of a pinball table. Lance plays with introducing gravity and kinetic energy into the works, adding a palpable sense of anxiety. There is even an added narrative element to the paintings. While still richly structured, Dehn�’s recent works are now much more sparse. Instead of loading the canvas with a multitude of little planes, he directs the viewer to focus on the interaction of a few elements. Ironically, these works have more of a sense of life than the bustling figures from his first series.
Dehn� recently showed his work in the Berliner Kunstprojekt show in Germany. It was his first solo show. He hinted in his interview about wanting to move into three dimensions in his next series. He is interested in offering the viewer a chance to physically interact with the pieces. He speculates about creating a scenario where the viewer could participate in constructing his own apparatus by using prefabricated parts. Dehn� alludes to his admiration for Jasper Johns, who moved his work into three dimensions without leaving painting. His own reverence for painting seems to indicate that he will never wander far from it, but will continue to work towards reconciling the gap between illusionist and three-dimensional space.
Contemporaneously, Lance still tries anxiously to strike a balance between life and abstraction. His garage studio is the front line of this conflict. He laughs when he talks about how he used to clear a table in his engineering studio to make room for his painting. Now his paintings have overwhelmed the small garage workshop; his drafting blueprints and other work gets squeezed out of the studio and onto to the kitchen table. Although it’s a constant tug of war, it seems that the tension between the disciplines continues to inform and give momentum to the painting.
