LOREN MARKS

Saudade

Sanderson are pleased to present Saudade, a new exhibition of works by Loren Marks.

Loren Marks (b.1991 Aotearoa, New Zealand) is an artist based between Naarm Melbourne and Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Her artworks present ethereal and dreamlike scenes whereby figures emerge from the alchemic realms of paint.

‘With motions reminiscent of Helen Frankenthaler’s “soak-stain” technique, Marks applies pools of thinned pigment to her surface. Colours bloom and mix into one another as they soak into the fibres of the canvas, bringing forth impressions of classical scenes and landscapes. From these abstracted planes, the artist adds and removes pigment allowing her figures to appear and dissolve into the turpentine washes of each layer.’

Saudade - Essay by Maya Love

Saudade is a Galician-Portuguese word that has been used in music and poetry since the 16th century. Although the word has no direct English translation, it refers to a feeling of bittersweet longing, a persistent but indefinable yearning for something absent.

Some believe that saudade originated in the wakes of departing ships during the Age of Exploration, leaping from the aching chests of those left at the water’s edge. The specifics of the missing thing are not critical – the subject could be an object, a lover, a homeland, a childhood, or any combination of person, place, and phenomena. It does not care if it is a memory long since past, a future unrealised, or an unspoken hope; saudade does not judge the lost article. Rather, it is a heady clemency in the wanting of the indefinite: a longing oriented toward infinity.

Loren Marks has found saudade to be a fitting description of her life over the last year. For her, saudade means a desire for something that does not exist, something ephemeral, simultaneously bygone and latent, and the ambivalent emotions that arise from change. Since her last exhibition at Sanderson Contemporary (2024), Marks has relocated to Naarm Melbourne, settling into a studio in Fitzroy, having received a government-supported place in the Masters of Contemporary Art course at the University of Melbourne. The suite of new works that she has created throughout this period have emerged from the ebbs of excitement and flows of uncertainty that come with moving to a new place.

Marks’ latest works are populated more than ever; inhabited by classical profiles, spectral forms, and graceful strangers. Her signature humid pastel tones have changed to a vivid and intense palette in the Melbourne climate. Hot-house orchid and mulled wine simmer in Clouds in Your Eyes, while a cold sea-foam sweeps through At Half Light. In response, the surface of the painting fogs with the heat of the body; hands pressed against the glass. And hands are everywhere, appearing in most works in the series. The outstretched fingers of Begin Again appear to find purchase in I Was Able to Go This Far, grasping onto a lone orange blossom. These hands show us the artist engaged in ritual acts of reclamation; transmuting and translating her inner worlds, if only for a moment, like dust particles in the late afternoon light.

For Marks, painting is universal in its capacity to communicate. It exists at the dizzying reaches of language, where words and sound go mute. Like many artists, Marks is reluctant to attribute specific meanings to her works. Rather, she moves great swathes of oil paint across the canvas, teasing out narratives with her solvents: following errant drips and coaxing spills of coloured chronicles. She layers and excavates her material until her palette knife articulates the dark matter of ineffable emotions into new yet familiar territory.