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CERCA Series: Mara De Luca
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
March 21, 2010 - June 27, 2010

Artist Statement
Stations (2006-2008)

“Stations,” a project two years in the making, is an installation of fourteen six-foot paintings, its form based on Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross (1958-64). It is an expression of the possibilities of self-denial in painting: in technique, concept and form. In the process of making these works, I pose the questions: how can I make an intensively hand-labored painting seem mechanically and flawlessly produced? How can a monochrome be read at once as flat surface while implying the depth of a late-evening Los Angeles sky? Can I subvert modernist techniques, such as pours, stains and action paintings to produce illusionism rather than abstraction? Can I compel the viewer with an uncompromising visual expression while employing these pre-determined, expression-less strategies? And what are the implications of these gestures, when the resulting imagery can be recognized as relating to contemporary visual mass media and propaganda?
With this work and my work in general, I am deeply committed to the language of painting; I aim to employ and exploit the complex range of the medium’s history, its diverse visual contexts, theoretical constructs as well as material, process and craft, to speak with a highly personal and expressive critical voice.

Altar Piece (2009)

Altar Piece is a double-sided, hinged triptych measuring six by nine feet. Altar Piece relates to the visual and conceptual ideas presented in Stations while borrowing from the conventions of free-standing triptych paintings; namely, a revelatory, colored and precious image protected by a black-and-white narrative exterior. The opened Altar Piece reveals an image representing a color-field “dawn”; this subtly-hued painting contrasts starkly with a poured and stained “targeted landscape” on the back. A third image is viewed by closing the hinged doors.