Mara De Luca

Titled 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.