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Lara Viana

Place of birth Salvador, Brazil
Country of residence United Kingdom
Contact lara_viana@hotmail.com

MA Painting, Royal College of Art, 2007. BA Fine Art: Falmouth School of Art.

Paintings and drawings by Lara Viana explore the relationships and tensions between the seen and unseen, and often depict a scenario in which an imminent event casts a shadow over the present moment.

Lara Viana’s work could be seen as a contemporary take on the continuing allure of nostalgia. She collects 1950s and 1960s slides obsessively, buying them from car boot sales and eBay. She prefers the kinds of slides that people hoard in their attics, and uses them to inspire her paintings which highlight the sadness in the optimism of the 50s and 60s.

Viana’s paintings often seem to show a foreboding event: something has just happened or is about to happen, casting a shadow over the moment.

It might be a confusion of sense but it appears that these paintings seem to contain a quality of heat. Invariably this feeling would simply issue from the use of colour alongside a certain set of associations related to the employment of imagery but I would detect something beyond these more obvious elements and this I think pertains to the functioning of memory. This is not to imply that these paintings are directly about the working of memory but I would claim that they have either a lingering or even a quality of yearning. Simply put, we enter these paintings not just as a means of discovering a lost continent trapped between the virtuality of memory and the actuality of place but we leave them touched by a feeling of otherness which I designate when I utter the word heat. Such passages through and within the work of art are by no means straightforward but the elegant gestural trails of paint, the various saturations of colour and mood cushion us into believing that such a passage might yield a revelation of the elsewhere. As sensation these paintings appear direct and yet as disguised narrative there is something less secure, like a half remember experience corroded by repression. The idea of a group of paintings that touch both this quality of corrosion and caress leaves me wanting to see more because I wish to linger within such strange mixtures of sense.


Afterimage, Phoenix Gallery, Brighton 2005.

Exhibitions Start Your Collection 2008!, 01.Aug - 20.Sep.08, Contemporary Art Projects, '00 Nature Part 1, 10.Apr - 15.May.08, Contemporary Art Projects, Start Your Collection 2007!, 01.Aug - 30.Sep.07, Contemporary Art Projects


www.laraviana.com

 

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