LUCIA LAGUNA

Since she began painting, the window has functioned as Laguna’s point of view and as a guide for her compositional decisions: it operates both as a system for ordering the surface into squares and rectangles and as a component that destabilises scale and creates new vistas within the frame.

These works, produced between this year,2024 and 2023, stand for a transitional moment in the artist’s explorations: Laguna has recently moved to a new studio, leaving the space where she worked and lived for over 40 years. This physical displacement also led to a formal and thematic transformation in her works, leading to the “two windows” in the show’s title. In paintings such as Paisagem nº 157 (2024), monochrome blocks and bands in neon shades of green, yellow, orange, red, and pink are new elements that expand her chromatic repertoire while sharpening the possibilities inherent in her practice. A dynamic of concealment and visual emphases creates luminous erasures, presences that also conceal. By cutting and crossing the surface, these geometric interventions of planes and lines de-hierarchise perspective, subverting proportions. Buildings and fragments of architecture are nestled within dense representations of the woods, crossing vegetal and constructive references.

Rooted in figures, her works flow into abstract passages. The incisive diagonals, colourful surface blockages, resolute cuts, and cross-sections that characterise Laguna’s paintings reference built elements such as walls, power lines, fences, and houses, thus translating the palimpsestic nature of Rio de Janeiro’s urban fabric. The presence of this maze-like landscape imposes a fragmentary understanding to which the artist responds with observations that are sometimes micro, sometimes macroscopic. The resulting works are deeply embedded in the environment, with a gaze that scrutinises and expands the surroundings, involved in the construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction of space.

The exhibition features an essay by critic and curator Diego Matos.

Special thanks to Claudia Moreira Salles for furnishing the show.