AROUND THE GALLERIES
Los Angeles Times
September 22, 2006
By Leah Ollman, Special to the Times
Making aerial landscapes playful
Aerial views distort and abstract. There’s something thrillingly unnatural about them, especially because they’re afforded largely by technological achievements of the modern era: jumbo jets and skyscrapers. Viewing a city from above, details slide away and geometric order becomes more pronounced; idiosyncrasies blur together as pattern takes over.
In her enjoyable recent drawings at Cirrus, Susan Logoreci also injects the aerial landscape with elasticity and playfulness, an organic fluidity usually more apparent at ground level. She works in colored pencil, articulating buildings, shadows and greenery as solid patches of cement gray, roof tile red and cypress green, fitted together as tightly as mosaic pieces. Streets and undeveloped land she leaves bare, supplying some visual breathing room and dramatic contrasts.
In “Beach,” for instance, a wedge of white paper representing the shore offsets the densely faceted built landscape adjacent. “213212” serves as an emblematic map of the U .S., with its horizontal spread of L.A. homes and apartment buildings on the left dissolving into the vertical spires of New York residential and office towers on the right.
Logoreci, based in Los Angeles reduces the built landscape to pattern and rhythm, a patchwork stitched of colored bits. Her drawings are charming in their irregularity, the way rows of windows swell and tilt, every bit of each city drawn — and savored — by hand.