LUCIA LAGUNA

The works on view, all created within the past year, reflect a recent shift in Laguna’s practice prompted by a change in her studio environment. For four decades, her personal and artistic life was rooted in her home and garden in the northern suburbs of Rio de Janeiro; about three years ago, she relocated to an apartment in the Laranjeiras neighborhood. This historic area in the city’s southern zone is between two mountains, with a denser urban configuration than her prior neighborhood. As her views changed and her studio space became more condensed, her proximity to her canvases and to her neighbors triggered compositional shifts. Her semi-abstracted landscapes seem to exist in undefinable spaces, both obscured and framed by windows, doors, and tiles. Each successive layer of paint adds dynamic organic forms—often trees and flowers, but sometimes birds and human forms. In doing so, Laguna addresses fracturing of natural spaces in the wake of urban development, and the persistence of nature to exist in spite of this.

Examples of her Pequenos formatos [Small formats] paintings take on an impressionistic quality while continuing her investigation of the relationship between domestic and urban spaces. In these intimately scaled works, which the artist calls ‘little delights,’ Laguna paints with broad, textured brushstrokes that highlight the organic nature of her forms. In some Pequenos formatos, spatial reasoning is provided by stark lines of vibrant colour that recall fences and window-frames. In others, geometric order is more directly rooted in the landscape, in tree trunks and houses whose edges contrast with the lushness of the vegetation.

In Lucia Laguna’s practice, her adoration of nature merges with her precise understanding of perspective, and how manmade elements impact how the organic world is seen. What results are poignant, exuberant distillations of how it feels to be human in a rapidly changing world.