Allison Lasley: Rome Journals

Rome, perhaps more than any other western city, symbolizes the contradictions of human history. An object lesson in the transitory nature of power, it offers anyone who would wander its streets continual reminders of its rises and declines. Crumbling remnants of ancient Roman aqueducts abut modern thoroughfares, while grand Renaissance colonnades and elaborate Baroque churches mingle with bustling street markets, suggesting a fading deference to glorious pasts which now exist only in memory. Meanwhile, on the perennially crowded streets and squares, tourists, peddlers, office workers and shopkeepers carry on their daily activities with only scant consciousness of the inescapability of the history which weighs down on them from every side.

The magic of Rome is one of the subjects of Allison Lasley’s “Rome Journals”. The other is her own day by day subjective response to the experience of living in a city where yesterday and today knock up against each other with little ceremony and no discrimination. This work is the artistic record of Lasley’s three month stay in Rome in the fall of 1997. As a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, Lasley tried to work every day. However, anticipating difficulties in getting large scale works back home at the end of her stay, she decided to experiment with a new approach to her art.

For some time, Lasley had been creating multilayered wood and plaster abstract paintings which were occasionally affixed with gold leaf and other materials. She began to adapt the aesthetic embodied in these works to the medium of paper and paper collage. These became a series of small six by six inch panels which served as records of her daily life.

Using water soluble inks and paints and bits of the flotsam and jetsam which she collected as she wound through the city, Lasley created a visual diary. It records her moods, the sights of the city, and even, by way of the collage elements, traces of the actual events of her three month stay. Arranged in a grid in the order in which they were produced, the paper squares create a mosaic of memory which conveys to the receptive viewer the emotional reality of Lasley’s subjective experiences.

The grid has been used in Modern art for a variety of purposes and effects. These range from the mystical grids of Alfred Jenson, the sagging grids of Eva Hesse, and the densely repetitive grids of Sol LeWitt. In Lasley’s hands, the grid offers a framework which provides an illusion of regularity. Yet within this framework, all the variations of daily life and experience can be expressed. On one level, each panel could exist as an independent painting. Some of the panels seem like tiny fragments of larger wholes - one can imagine them extending indefinitely beyond the edges of the paper. Others seem complete in themselves, tiny paintings which are exquisitely self contained.

Taken together the tapestry of small paintings expresses the complex texture of lived experience, where sights, sounds, and smells mingle with dreams, memories, and fantasies. Subtle changes across the grid become a map of the incremental progress of the passing days.

The individual panels express a variety of responses to Rome. Quite a few take as their departure point the rich and varied architecture of the city. Among Lasley’s sources of inspiration are Rome’s Pantheon, colonnades, gates, rotundas and labyrinths. In her hands, these are translated into abstract forms and patterns which make reference as well to modernist paintings. Often fleeting hints of their sources are all that remain.

Thus, rows of columns become a series of bars which bring to mind the stripe paintings of Brice Marden or Sean Scully. Gates and apertures become simple arches, while many of the paintings are composed of a simple four part grid which also suggests a window. Formal gardens are transformed into schematic arrangements of rectangles and circles. In several panels, the capitals of Corinthian columns become a playful filigree composed of whiplash lines. There are also a number of crosses. These make references to the city’s ecclesiastical buildings, but they also make one think of the quiet black on black paintings of Ad Reinhardt.

At times, one is reminded here about how the camera can zero in on an apparently unremarkable bit of battered wall or cracked sidewalk and make it unexpectedly beautiful. Lasley’s eye does the same - focusing and abstracting until the ordinary is transformed into something wondrous. She reveals the abstraction latent in the everyday world.

Some of the panels reflect the hues of the city - one glimpses the terra cotta of old buildings, the blue gray of overcast autumn days, the colorful flashes of graffiti scrawled across crumbling walls, the vibrant green of public gardens. One feels at certain moments the warmth of the hot Mediterranean sun, the coolness of water, the chill of coming winter, the fading light of dusk and the glow of electric lights dotting the nighttime city. Emotionally the palette of the paintings conveys shades of emotions that range from a blue tinged melancholy to the sheer exuberance of sunny patterns of yellow and green. Placed alongside each other in a grid on the wall, the panels create shifting patterns of color which begin to assume their own internal rhythm.

Often the panels incorporate actual objects which act as memory pegs. Receipts, postage stamps and train tickets provide physical traces of trips, purchases, communications. A cigarette paper laid over a row of toothpicks becomes a window shade. A postcard of a Byzantine Madonna and Child interrupted by bits of patterned rice paper becomes a peeling church mural. One panel incorporates bits of the actual map of the city which Lasley used to navigate the winding streets until it became so dog-eared that it was no longer usable.

There are also words scrawled like graffiti across or around a panel. Sometimes these whimsically recall some specific experience - as when Lasley incorporated the word “Gucci” together with actual ribbons from shopping bags left behind by some young friends who visited her and went on a shopping spree. Another panel is inscribed with the words, “Bruno Carni” (Bad Meat) commemorating an unfortunate experience at a Roman trattoria.

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.

In Lasley’s hands, collage serves another purpose as well. It reminds us that the city of Rome is a kind of collage itself, woven together from stones, fountains and building remnants from different periods of time. The whole city has the same sense of serendipity and gerry rigged structure that mark this mesmerizing tapestry of small paintings.

Removed from their place of origin, the “Rome Journals” become more universal. One need not know the exact facade or street corner which inspired each section to share the emotional resonance of the experience which brought it forth. The flickering colors, bits of paper and string, archetypal shapes and evocative tines and marks encourage viewers to make their own personal associations. In the process, they invite us to ruminate on our own response to daily life. In fact, one of the most important functions of the “Rome Journals” is to remind us that riches await anyone who looks closely at his or her surrounds.

Citation:
Heartney, Eleanor. “Allison Lasley: Rome Journals.” Allison Lasley: Rome Journals. New York, NY: Fifth Floor Foundation, 1998. © 1998 Eleanor Heartney