Alf Lohr

Alf Lohr’s paintings are swift and luminous transcriptions of experience.  What they record is the moment when our perception is arrested by the impact of the visual field, the microcosmic world of phenomena, on our senses.

What is arrested with vibrant immediacy – for example in The murmuring of bees has ceased – is an experience of the world before it is mediated by words and concepts. For Alf, ‘objective emotion’ is about retaining that primary impression, and about working in that fragile space between impact and explanation. This aversion to the categorical extends also to the language of ‘abstraction’; its formal terms inhibit our own subliminal reading, one that invites us to submerge ourselves in the images rather than draw particular meanings out of them. What is deeply felt, he implies, is also deeply ordered.

Alf Lohr, Objective Emotion, Broadbent London, October – November 2008