Allison Lasley: Rome Journals

Other texts seem to evoke more general experiences. In one, the fleeting nature of love in this most romantic of cities is suggested by the word, “Amore” traced in almost invisible blue letters on a white ground. (Lasley notes mischievously that the word also contains the letters that spell “Roma.”) In another, the word “tabu” lines each of the four edges of a panel. While, to an outsider, this suggests a graphic representation of the continuing nature of prohibitions, Lasley notes that she was also inspired by the availability of a tinned licorice candy of the same name. Meanwhile, the word “labirinto” set below a schematic maze makes reference to the intricate tangle of streets that any visitor to Rome must learn to navigate.

Panels range from the literal to the symbolic to the completely abstract. One can detect a wide range of artistic references. Quite a few panels contain hints of Rothko’s luminous fields of color, here doubling, more often than not, as windows or doors. A dynamic slash of paint across a monochrome back ground has echoes of Franz Kline. Other panels suggest the delicate tracery of Chinese calligraphy. The softly rounded triangles, rectangles, diamonds and circles bring to mind the implicit spirituality of Sol LeWitt’s luminous wall paintings. Yet other panels have something of the promiscuous graffiti of Jean Michel Basquiat.

Lasley’s choice of format also has art historical overtones. The use of the grid to enclose glowing squares of colors brings to mind the pictographs of Paul Klee. The wry wit of the juxtapositions of images and objects has a Duchampian flavor. And the incorporation of collage elements recalls their use by Picasso and Braque during their cubist years. Lasley’s paintings remind us why collage has long been a favored modernist tool of disrupting the apparent seamlessness of the pictorial world. Bits of Roman debris become urban fossils which connect the viewer in the most visceral way to this pulsing, dynamic city.