Anna Lascari - Pink

Anna Lascari, SPEEDDOWN Sugar in Water, 2009, acrylic inks on Arches, 25.9” x 40”, photo Kostas Deligiannidis

a.antonopoulou.art Gallery - Athens, Greece

By Dimitra Kollerou

One of the main characteristics and topics of today’s big cities is the emergence of various, new resident tribes. With the appearance of the urbanites, a new code of living and understanding has appeared. Since we live in big cities, we are used to being part of a large crowd, feeling safe in it, losing our identity, but also at times losing our chance to be touched, seen and understood. Our lives become a spontaneous preview of an unknown story, lost in the anonymity of the multitude.

In contemporary art, many artists have worked with diverse approaches to the urban theme. Anna Lascari is offering us her new work about life in a city, and inevitably desperation and isolation, common features of a western city’s behavioral profile.

Her personal approach to an atmosphere that embraces us every day, while walking through wide streets, is here transformed into unique moments that compose a greater melody. Graphic and sound repetition is the key to creating an inner rhythm that guides us to see, hear and experience this work.

Through three different categories: drawing, sculpture and installation, Anna Lascari is inviting us to share her own particular point of view related to city inhabitants, their agony, their lack of time and the absence of true hope.

Her series of drawings, entitled Speed Down, confident and elegant, recreate the continuous movements of an anonymous crowd. Bodies, firm colors and shapes are being combined, men and women becoming one organism that is in eternal movement. The absence of background space and personal characteristics creates an ambiguous atmosphere of calm and anxiety at the same time. We can establish a narrative through the variety of elements, like guiding arrows, hieratic dogs, delicate butterflies, mysterious frogs, evolving poppies, empty benches, Superman and Wonderwoman’s portraits, elements that hide an inner urban iconographic lecture.

A moving goose sculpture, Dorothy, stands in the middle and every three seconds a cry of unease and discomfort comes out of her filling the space. In the space, we also find a 3D recreation of an arrow, seen in the drawings, that reproduces sounds of the busy contemporary city, like people walking.

The installation, Three Songs, is a construction that invites us to enter its four small compartments and define ourselves under the stimuli offered. A video projection of pink, innocent and delightful flowers becomes the birth of the human, where the color is transformed into blood; meanwhile, speakers activated by the visitor’s touch simulate vague sounds of an urban panorama. A devastating dichotomy is being created, the crowd and the isolation, loneliness and death, speed and calm.

Lascari’s work leads us from a stable and quiet rhythm into a continuous and emerging sense of anxiety. Familiar and identifiable images and sounds become our guide to a reflection related to our identity as contemporary individuals.

(January 8 - February 10, 2010)

Dimitra Kollerou is an art historian based in Athens.

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