Catherine Lorent works with an expanded Baroque concept of art that exposes the contradictions of the modern western way of life and questions dialectical thought. Her very practice undermines well-established categories, combining painting, drawing and sculpture with performance, music and theatrical stagings into visually and acoustically charged installations. Her musical project Gran Horno, in which she acts simultaneously as a visual artist and a multi-instrumentalist, epitomises this multidisciplinary approach, which at first sight appears to pander to the current trend towards “event exhibitions”. But Lorent’s work anything but superficial, transposes complex Baroque strategies for a sensual Gesamtkunstwerk into the modern age. Inspired or seduced by her mystical, hermetical work, spectators are often encouraged by its participatory components to give free rein to their own creativity and respond to the artist’s idea with a subjective reinterpretation.

The title of the sound installation shown at Ca’ del Duca – Relegation – refers to the longstanding rejection, or “banishment”, of Baroque in the history of art, nowhere more so than in Venice, where Late Baroque architecture was stifled in its development by “anti-Baroque polemics”. Contrary to similar Baroque-averse tendencies in the current Berlin art canon, Lorent’s work posits the formal vocabulary of Baroque as a central reference point. Citing pamphlets from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Lorent, who holds a PhD in art history, appropriates Baroque iconography relating to concepts of the sublime, power and domination, while highlighting the absurdities and contradictions which Baroque artists themselves had been very much aware of. For binary models fall short of explaining the complexities of the world: good and bad or ratio and religio may be antagonistic concepts, but in reality they are closely intertwined.