MARA DE LUCA – SALTUS FIDEI | LEAP OF FAITH
2011-10-31Titled the Sipario series (Italian for theatrical curtain or scrim), Mara De Luca’s exciting new paintings are a reflection on a contemporary sublime that is profound in its absolute superficiality and theatricality. The Sipario paintings are inspired by the aesthetic and emotional experience of daily life in Los Angeles, a city of visual contrasts and contradictions: stunning natural beauty coexisting in a cultural climate of facile content, saturated digital aesthetics and air-brushed, synthetic effects. The works address the existential through a romanticized and hyper-analog translation of digital media and contemporary imaging tropes particular to mass media and visual culture.
In the Sipario paintings, constructed landscape and atmospheric imagery present a mirroring of process and content – their exaggerated artifice reveals and disguises the processes by which they have been made, and a relationship between picture and craft is evident. Ranging in color from bright, glowing artificial to a natural and grayscale palette, the picture planes are vast and vacuous, evoking the emotional emptiness of unflinchingly optimistic, success-oriented Hollywood values and self-improvement ideology. Iconographic elements – appearing as recurring texts, rainbows, moon and stars – point to themes of faith, hope and desire. Visual “faith”, or suspension of disbelief, is required of the viewer throughout and is a thematic thread connecting the diverse works.
Opposite – Odette, 2010
Exhibition runs through to November 18th, 2011
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
2685 S. La Cienega Boulevard
Los Angeles
CA 90034
