The city is the great modern stage set, the place where the drama of the new was first born. Urban life, with its density, energy, and complexity provided the conditions for our notion of what modern life could mean. In the metropolis was the dream of “the shining city on the hill”, the secular version of transcendence and power. And the city was, at the same time, imagined as a place where the individual could lose his or her way in its dark labyrinths of anonyminity and iniquity.

Layla Fanucci’s cityscapes capture this paradox of the city as both magnificent and daunting. In her paintings, each based on a specific city, she creates a vision of architecture piled up into a dense mass of impacted forms. The individual buildings maintain a tenuous grip on their own identities, much as the populace of the painted cities seems subsumed by the huge forms looming above them. Fanucci’s cities have an undeniable grandeur, from the arching colossus of the Eiffel Tower, to the powerful curve of a bridge with the skyscrapers of Manhattan beyond. Even in her depictions of places steeped in traditions, such as Rome, Venice, and Istanbul, the splendor of the city rings clear, as the habitat that cultures build both to shelter and to celebrate themselves.

On large canvases, Fanucci establishes shifting fields of color, over which she paints networks of linear brush strokes, which coalesce into the forms and patterns of the city. The intuitive directness of her approach, its painterly energy, and graphic invention all bespeak both the hyped-up excess of urban experience and something more intensely personal, expressive of the artist and her inner world. The brush strokes are both descriptive and urgent, the color ranging from melancholy to fiery. The resulting images are diverse in character, attesting to the multiplicity of urban life and the human moods which these images seem to embody.

Fanucci’s paintings are paradoxes in the best sense, strong visual presences, yet somehow immaterial, even dream-like. These paintings exist as evocations of places we inhabit, yet they rise like scrims in the theater of the imagination. They bring us back to the dark wonder of entering a great city for the first time. Awe-stuck, fearful, we are nonetheless impelled to wander deeper down its mysterious streets, fortuitously coming upon that oddly familiar and thus comforting monument that lets us know that we are truly in that place that we have always wanted to be.

John Mendelsohn