Lara.

by Davide Rondoni

Faces are an obsession for artists. With faces and with heads. That space between nothing and human presence, between a vacuum and an infinite amount of history, love, pain, light and shadow. That is the human face.

Lara approaches her faces with gentle fury. They seem happy with all those colors. And then you see instead that they are not just fun decorations, but the cheerfulness of the deep. A depth that result from blind pain and harsh anxiety.

Faces seen after being devoured in the jaws nothingness.

This is why they are brightly colored like flowers and sprout upward like imaginative toys and as childish gestures. Artists are children who are full of pain.

If it were not for this surprise, Lara's faces would be decorations. Simple masks. A rip-off.

Instead, her eyes are full of doubts, full of videos, full of our shadows, and we look on in surprise. And as with the human faces, we do not know, whether to love them or to look away.

A true artist never takes you in the center of a consolation, but in the fire of a real problem.

With rough delicacy, this is exactly what Lara does to us. Her faces do not leave us. They deconstruct and reconstruct right before our very eyes. Or maybe not. Maybe they are still a work-in-progress, composing themselves even as we speak. They are not packaged.

In her studio of pain and joy, Lara deposes her faces and knows that their true composition will depend on the gaze of each and every spectator. She knows with the patient suffering of every artist, that at first glance, there is the risk that her work may be relegated to the category of, 'cute things', colorful pictures to be put in a home, in the living room as decoration. Or - even in a working role, or deposited in quiet guest rooms maybe to be viewed with the sweet pity of recognizable faces, this violent injury of faces to be recognized and re-recognized over and over again.