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Lauretta Vinciarelli Watercolors | By Caitlin Lorraine Johnson

Lauretta Vinciarelli Watercolors | By Caitlin Lorraine Johnson

When I first saw paintings by Lauretta Vinciarelli, the Italian architect and artist, I forgot about the pandemic. I forgot I can’t linger to squeeze avocados at the grocery store, that I wipe door knobs before turning them, that my shoulders tense when family and friends don’t answer the phone.

Pictured Left to Right : Suspended in Green, 2005. Watercolor on paper | Suspended in Red II, 2005. Watercolor on paper.

Instead, I thought about the dual nature of light—how light sometimes behaves as a particle and sometimes as a wave. How everything, examined closely enough, begins to look like something else. Lauretta Vinciarelli’s watercolor-and-ink abstractions evoke a space within light—an architecture of the indefinite. Each time I look, I see a different image.

As fellow architect Leebeus Woods wrote, “In her paintings, we never step back to see an overall picture, but are always within, remaining free to hope that her world of beauty and harmonious order might, in different ways, extend beyond the limits of the frame.”

At this time, when it has become difficult to breathe deeply in the atmosphere beyond the frame, Lauretta Vinciarelli’s paintings allow us to linger within it… among shapes suspended in light.

To read more about Lauretta Vinciarelli, see also: a tribute by Lebbeus Woods and a glance through Clear Light: The Architecture of Lauretta Vinciarelli

Associated Interests:

*song Tezeta by Mulatu Astatke
*selection of prints to benefit artists: artrelief.org
*virtual tour of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam 
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