We are pleased to present Jardim [Garden], the first solo show by the artist Lucia Laguna at Galeria Fortes Vilaça. The exhibition features new acrylic and oil paintings, based on the landscape of the artist’s daily life.
 
Lucia Laguna’s painting portrays her surroundings: the landscape of suburban Rio de Janeiro, the district’s informal architecture, the artist’s own studio and the garden of her house. They are slices of the landscape presented in a veiled, nearly abstract way. Shapes, lines and color fields are overlaid with more figurative elements, often giving the impression of a broken mirror.
 
Laguna has developed a unique method, in which images are produced in acrylic paint by her assistants, according to her guidelines, who then completes or deconstructs them using oil paint. They are compositions where it seems that the process of painting never ends, the images remains alive and changeable before our eyes. The painting arises not only from observation, but also from an empirical practice of juxtaposition and reprocessing of everyday images, generating an accumulation of memories.
 
The garden of Lucia’s canvases is urban and characteristic of Rio de Janeiro. It shows itself amid a mix of stones and vases, the hills are taken by houses, and the backyards are full of rubble. In Jardim nº 11, for example, we see only a little table with houses in the background, there is no green on the canvas. The artist leaves large areas covered by patches of paint in colors ranging from beige to yellow, giving the impression of a field yet to be filled. It is an invitation for the spectator to project his/her own images on the accumulation of memories preserved under the mass of color.
 
In Jardim nº 10, a large horizontal canvas, the artist offers us a sweeping personal panorama of the city she inhabits. The green of the plants and trees appears interspersed by sketched houses and vases, as though we were looking through the window of a house in an urban center where everything is always in constant movement.
 
Lucia Laguna was born in Campo dos Goytacazes, RJ, in 1941. She received her degree in language studies in 1971 and began to teach the Portuguese language. In the mid-1990s, the artist took courses in painting and history of art at Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, in Rio de Janeiro. She held her first solo show in 1998. She participated in the Panorama de Arte Brasileira, MAM-SP, in 2011; the 2005/2006 edition of the Instituto Itaú Cultural’s Programa Rumos Artes Visuais in 2006; and received the CNI SESI Marcantônio Vilaça Prize. Her work figures in the collections of the Museu de Arte Moderna of Rio de Janeiro and that of São Paulo, the Museu Nacional de Brasília, among others. She recently participated in the 30th São Paulo Biennial which is currently traveling through the state’s interior.