MARA DE LUCA
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CERCA Series: Mara De Luca
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
March 21, 2010 - June 27, 2010
Stations is an installation of fourteen six-foot paintings arranged in sequential order, its form based on Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross (1959-64). The Stations series presents recurring motifs derived from advertisement, televised war coverage, Hollywood studio icons, Baroque painting and political propaganda, each made with technical strategies borrowed from modernist painting: process "quotations" appropriated from Abstract Expressionism, Color-field Painting and Minimalism such as pours, actions, one-shots, stains and pre-determined systems. With these methods, significant to the theoretical discourse of modernist abstraction, I generate instead stylized illusions- de-asserted picture planes1 representing a range of lighting effects and color fields with each recurring motif: cloudy skies, targets and explosions. The viewer thus encounters poured clouds, action-painted skies, literally camouflaged targets as well as deeply spatial "objective" monochromes representing light and atmosphere.
The project is my response to a post-911 cultural and social environment saturated with Hollywood aesthetics and manipulative effects in advertisement, entertainment and news media. The paintings are conversely an expression of modernist rigor and self-denial in technique, concept and form. In making these works, I pose the questions: how can I make an intensively hand-labored painting seem mechanically and flawlessly produced? How can a monochrome be read at once as flat surface while implying the depth of a late-evening Los Angeles sky? Can I subvert modernist techniques such as pours, stains and action paintings to produce illusionism rather than abstraction? Can I compel the viewer with an uncompromising visual expression while employing expression-less strategies? And, when the resulting imagery can be recognized as relating to contemporary visual mass media and propaganda, what are the implications of these gestures?
This intentional collision of two opposites, abstraction and illusion, is an attempt to create a contemporary critical gesture, one inspired by Barnett Newman's engagement in a radical cultural criticism expressed paradoxically through pure material abstraction. The project reflects my deep commitment to the language of painting; in my practice, I employ and exploit the complex range of the medium's history, its diverse visual contexts, theoretical constructs as well as material, process and craft.
1In 1943, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko famously wrote a letter to The New York Times in which they stated, "We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth" thus coining the theoretical construct critical to late-modern abstraction of the fifties and early sixties: "the reasserted picture plane".