Mara De Luca: Western Gate
TOTAH presents Western Gate, featuring new paintings by Mara De Luca. Western Gate will be on view from December 11th, 2024 through February 15th, 2025. This is the artist's third solo exhibition with the gallery.
Mara De Luca's recent paintings are storied meditations on the promise of utopia. Taking California as her inspiration, she translates its atmospheric light and littoral skyscapes into the language of abstraction. Light takes on a metaphoric value; the physical labor of painting is redressed as a sheer architecture of color and space. Moving past the observations which serve as her starting point, her paintings offer up a sheer constellation of forms for which there is no natural equivalent. Depicting skies that are more than skies, or light overwhelming sight, the works on view in Western Gate foster a specific quality of attentiveness that is equal parts experience and chimera.
A technical feature apparent throughout Western Gate is De Luca's facility for layering, which underscores the oppositions inherent in her work. Using graduated washes of color that move from warm tones to cool, subtle gestural shifts come into play. A painting like Sun Gaze (2024), for instance, is a diptych combining a systematic gradient on one side and an aleatory pour gesture on the other. Thematizing natural light, De Luca amplifies its presence to a nova-like brilliance. Across two canvases, light successively gives way to a spectral granulation of the act of seeing. As patches of canvas show through the yellow monochromatic wash, Sun Gaze analogically suggests a state of spiritual blindness, where excessive brightness is tantamount to the absence of light.
The segmented narratives discoverable in De Luca's work crystallize time as a dissolving force. In paintings such as Western Gate 2 (2024), a tension emerges between the ethereal content of the image, and the stark materiality that gives it shape. Alluding to conceptualism as much as romanticism, spatial references of center and periphery become blurred. The ambiguity is less a trick of the eye than a visual gloss on the nuanced emotions registered by the viewer.
Recommended for you
TOTAH presents Western Gate, featuring new paintings by Mara De Luca. Western Gate will be on view from December 11th, 2024 through February 15th, 2025. This is the artist's third solo exhibition with the gallery.
Mara De Luca's recent paintings are storied meditations on the promise of utopia. Taking California as her inspiration, she translates its atmospheric light and littoral skyscapes into the language of abstraction. Light takes on a metaphoric value; the physical labor of painting is redressed as a sheer architecture of color and space. Moving past the observations which serve as her starting point, her paintings offer up a sheer constellation of forms for which there is no natural equivalent. Depicting skies that are more than skies, or light overwhelming sight, the works on view in Western Gate foster a specific quality of attentiveness that is equal parts experience and chimera.
A technical feature apparent throughout Western Gate is De Luca's facility for layering, which underscores the oppositions inherent in her work. Using graduated washes of color that move from warm tones to cool, subtle gestural shifts come into play. A painting like Sun Gaze (2024), for instance, is a diptych combining a systematic gradient on one side and an aleatory pour gesture on the other. Thematizing natural light, De Luca amplifies its presence to a nova-like brilliance. Across two canvases, light successively gives way to a spectral granulation of the act of seeing. As patches of canvas show through the yellow monochromatic wash, Sun Gaze analogically suggests a state of spiritual blindness, where excessive brightness is tantamount to the absence of light.
The segmented narratives discoverable in De Luca's work crystallize time as a dissolving force. In paintings such as Western Gate 2 (2024), a tension emerges between the ethereal content of the image, and the stark materiality that gives it shape. Alluding to conceptualism as much as romanticism, spatial references of center and periphery become blurred. The ambiguity is less a trick of the eye than a visual gloss on the nuanced emotions registered by the viewer.
Artists on show
Contact details
Related articles
TOTAH presents Western Gate, featuring new paintings by Mara De Luca.
