Looking at the paintings of Laura Limbourg (b.1996) is like attending a vaporwave party in Chinatown (Note 1) on a Southeast Asian beach, where naked, youthful women remove their makeup in the heat and humidity, posing for themselves, unconcerned by the gaze of the viewers. In the party, a boy holding a koi fish with his private parts covered settles into the world of still life and landscape and stares at us.
The party is not all excitement and fun. It is not until we step up close that we notice the tension of the image drenched in linen. The artist's choice of contrasting colors, thin acrylics, and graffiti-like line sketches create a different kind of euphoric mood on the unprimed linen. The watercolor and ink-like haloes of the images are on the verge of dissolving, thus blurring the clarity between images and object references.
Note 1: Vaporwave is an electronic music and visual art genre that emerged in the Internet community in the early 2010s, often further synthesizing derivative visual elements, such as coconut trees, plaster casts, sunsets, cybernetic mesh spaces, low-resolution images, or the 1980s-1990s commercial advertising images, to express an emotion of passive acceptance, loss, and depression.
