Digital Legerdemain of Loretta Lux

Critics have responded in a number of ways to the digital legerdemain of Loretta Lux, a former German painter and currently a photographer creating rather formal, quasi-portraits of children. Her creations - utilizing photography, painting, and Photoshop technique of digital manipulation - have been described as disquieting, disturbing, repellent, displaying barely sublimated eroticism, creepy, kitschy, and monstrous, as well as charming, arresting, lovely, fashion-magazine-photography-like, fascinating and beautiful.

(Study of a Boy 1)

The genre of portraiture is undermined by means of showing children who "do not belong to themselves": the portrayed children do not represent themselves, they are awkwardly distant, anonymous and unengaged figures of children, dressed in vintage clothes and willed into existence. The surreal, doll-like, emotional opacity of the children's gazes evokes what is missing, yet the artifice is not hidden but accentuated, creating thereby eerily enigmatic air of obscure, carefully composed inconsistency superficially nearing oddly smooth perfection of calculated charm. The photographed subjects are slightly altered: they have distended hands and limbs, enlarged heads and eyes, their faces wear distinctive deathly pallor, their hair is silky, and their skin translucent.

(Girl With Marbles)

The sense of staginess is dramatized by the serene, shadowless, light background, into which the children - in heavily mannered poses - are set. By virtue of such Photoshop devices as Gaussian blur, unsharp masking and level control as well as thanks to the use of manual coloring, the subtle color palette is impeccable and the composition of forms is carefully structured, underlying thus the lurking element of fantasy.

(The Green Room)

Numerous influences, especially among Renaissance and German Romantic painters (some of whom have been cited by the artist herself) might be noted. They include: Agnolo Bronzino, Diego Velázquez, Francisco de Goya, Balthasar Kłossowski de Rola (known as Balthus), Piero della Francesca, Caspar David Friedrich, Philipp Otto Runge, etc. Lux's photographs also resemble those of a German photographer, August Sander.

(Bronzino: Bia, the Illegitimate Daughter of Cosimo I de' Medici)

(de Goya: Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zunica)

(Runge: The Hulsenbeck Children)

(Velázquez: Las Menians [a fragment])