Lauretta Vinciarelli at Henry Urbach Architecture - New York - Brief Article

Lauretta Vinciarelli's series of watercolors, "Intimate Distance" (1997-2002), confronts one with what appear to be the suspended floors of a skyscraper penetrated by a great column of light. Presence competes with absence in these works, all roughly 30 by 22 inches, vertically oriented and symmetrically composed around rectilinear piers. Vinciarelli enlists the luminous style of architectural rendering she has practiced for over a decade, with subtle modulations of finely ruled washes of blues and ochers that turn nearly white as the light breaks through the suggestions of architectural substance. Only at the edges of the immaculately controlled fields does the eye confirm that we have been lured close to a tactile residue of water and pigment and not the expected pix-elated surface.

While Vinciarelli's past work recalled public spaces and untold narratives, the singularity and open-ended compositions of this series suggest a more private world of emotional experience. In her published work on cities, Vinciarelli, who teaches at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, has argued for understanding public space as an extension of the private realm rather than as its opposite. Like the suite of watercolors she exhibited in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, "Intimate Distance" presents not just imaginary structures, but contemplative ones as well.

Post-Sept. 11, it is, I think, impossible not to attribute a memorial quality to "Intimate Distance." With its Zen-like title and luminescent tones of stone and sky, the series seems of a piece with the Tribute in Light monument projected into the downtown sky last spring. Like utopian architects of the past--and Bruno Taut's Glass Pavilion (1914) comes readily to mind--Vinciarelli uses the least substantial elements, in this case light and water, to generate architectural expressions of the transcendent.

Resonating with such spirituality is the work which started the series, Orange Incandescence II (1997). A triptych representing shallow boxes glowing orange and located high in a blue field, it evokes both birth and entombment. Here, as in the successive watercolors, we see what is described in the title of the. artist's 1998 monograph: "Not architecture but evidence that it exists."

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