Academics fed my habit. It allowed me to make my images and to travel.
Lehrer’s work is highly regarded. While he has worked in a variety of media, it is his lithographic prints that allow his formal structure and sense of order to shine. His subjects lean towards classicism; he has a well-documented interest in formal and so-called paradise gardens, focusing on flowers, statuary, sculpted putti, urns and ornamental fountains. His latest work employs digital tools to review and recombine snippets from his massive personal image bank. Garden V is a wonderful example of his vertically oriented digital prints. In it the artist stacks layers of imagery in horizontal bands like architectural friezes. The top register contains a crisp image of a blue fountain centered on the page like a crown. Underneath, saturated photographic slices of gardens are alternated with semi-abstracted material from nature. Clarity is juxtaposed with painterly layers obscuring foliage, water and fish. The kaleidoscopic facets are capped and stabilized at the bottom with another photographic detail of garden surroundings, including blue walls mirroring the vibrantly blue fountain at the top.
Many of Lehrer’s works address the theme of paradise. Whether careful compositions of idyllic travel spots or works with Arcadian themes, each suggests a cultural Eden. What I learned early when I first started to be aware of the formal garden was that this was ae a culture’s way of establishing its collective view of what paradise on earth was. There was a precious little Eden that cultures went to regularly. Maybe because I grew up next to a park in the middle of a city I had an intuitive reaction, asking why in the midst of this tremendous compression of row houses is there a sense of total peace when you go into the park? Lehrer’s latest prints are loaded with ideas from earlier work and nostalgic details from a life well lived. It’s as if he has come full circle and is now being drawn back in time to the first place he knew, the Philadelphia immigrant community of Strawberry Mansion.
aether
29