Katerina Lanfranco Rose Garden, 2020. Oil paint and mixed media on canvas, 22 x 28”
Art is a refuge both for the viewer and the maker. Katerina Lanfranco’s recent exhibition at Sweet Lorraine Gallery, Nature Poems, offers respite from these strange and unsettling times. The exhibition starts with an exquisite painting titled, Bouquet for You. Its deft placement in the gallery is significant as it presages the story of the entire show in microcosm. Three encapsulated womb-like flower forms grow amid a dense, swirling, chaotic background teeming with what look like sperm cells and luminous spinning orbs. Practically buzzing with a sparkler’s sizzle, this wellspring of life is shot through with skeins of golden paint tracing through and around the orbs. The golden trails recall the rays of golden light falling onto the Virgin in Renaissance Annunciation scenes. Here instead of symbolizing the conception of Christ, Lanfranco suggests the secular, “scientific” conception of the Universe.
Katerina Lanfranco Bouquet for You, 2020. Oil paint and mixed media on canvas board, 12 x 9”
Created during the pandemic, Nature Poems, obliquely reflects the historical moment in which it was made. That is to its credit. Its strength and power lie in its authenticity and strong connection to the themes that have long dominated Lanfranco’s work: beauty, nature, humankind’s relationship to the natural world, the nature of existence, spirituality, and most significantly, the idea that humankind, the natural world, and the universe are one. Nature Poems is an origin story and a kind of prequel to Mystic Geometry, the major body of work Lanfranco created between 2018-2019, an ecstatic Eden-like vision of life on earth synthesized with an exploration of spirituality.
New Dawn, as the name implies, portrays the dawn of a new age via a faded cartoon blueprint of creation writ large. An unstretched canvas tacked to the wall with push pins, it is the largest painting in the group and represents a magnified diagram of the next stage in the growth cycle of the embryonic life forms presented throughout the show. A muscular flower breaks out from a massive seed pod. The sperm-like forms seen in Bouquet for You are here again, exponentially larger and housed within lotus petals framed by artery-like flower forms evocative of the distinctive pop, graphic sensibility of Carroll Dunham.
Not every artwork refers to the birth of the universe, some are delicate love-letters from earth. An emblem of innocence and hope, Buttercups (A Palimpsest of Spring) displays a sacred preserve of childlike, thickly painted, pale-colored flowers, sealed in a reliquary-like box frame for safe-keeping. Rain clouds decorate the handmade purple and blue frame. Tender and poetic, it seems to scream: “Never let this go!”
Elegiac and haunting, Blue Majorca is a boldly sketched image of a cobalt blue lotus haloed in gold. Its transparent petals reveal a silvery Ab-Ex-like, gritty, atmosphere speckled with black dots. Possessing an ominous, forceful presence like the Hindu god Shiva, it radiates the power to both create and destroy. Paint and glitter-encrusted artificial flowers, fabric scraps and string suggest domesticity–earthly detritus memorialized, a tether between two realms: earth, and outer space.
Katerina Lanfranco Blue Majorca, 2020. Oil paint and mixed media on canvas, 24 x 30”
Katerina Lanfranco Buttercups (Palimpsest of Spring), 2020. Oil paint and mixed media on panel in shadow box, 9 x 5 x 2”
The tour de force of the show is Rose Garden, an otherworldly scene of surging life forms and intense vitality. Gases rise in the background of a murky green swamp, fierce, hungry-looking florescent pink animalistic flowers, greedily clutch glowing neon-colored bulbs. Long skinny finger-shaped petals capture the bulbs tenaciously like precious jewels in the prongs of a ring setting, betraying a raw will to survive, an especially apropos affirmation in 2020.
Just when we need it most, Nature Poems provides round trip time travel to a dramatically beautiful place where dynamic elements of a burgeoning primordial universe are interspersed with beloved familiar, nostalgic, and grief-tinged images of earth and remnants of human culture.
Lanfranco’s imaginings of the birth of our universe contextualizes within a cycle of life, existential philosophy, and world history, the nearly unbearable present moment we live in. Nature Poems allows us to sit calmly with our thoughts and fears knowing that this crisis is part of the eternal story of existence. A Gen Xer, interested in astronomy from a young age, Lanfranco’s Nature Poems, echo Carl Sagan’s poetic assertion: “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
Katerina Lanfranco New Dawn, 2020. Mixed media and collage on paper, 61 x 59”
View Nature Poems online
All images courtesy of the artist
Suzanne de Vegh is a Program Director at Pratt Institute and prior to that was Director of Public Programs at the American Folk Art Museum. She earned a MSEd in Museum Leadership from Bank Street College. Suzanne is an independent curator and has published art criticism in journals including: ART PAPERS, American Ceramics, The Brooklyn Rail, Ceramics Art & Perception, Sculpture, artcritical.com, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art.