Lori-Ann Bellissimo

by Gina Fairley

“I am transitory…only stationery for moments in time…much like the universe. I have put my faith in my work for a concrete basis...It is what I trust.”Bellissimo, 2009

In 1609 Galileo, in a revolutionary move, turned his sites towards the heavens. Using the newly invented telescope he unleashed conventional understanding of space and set mankind on a path of astral gazing that has lasted 400 years. Lori-Ann Bellissimo shares Galileo’s courage to look within and beyond ourselves. Her world is an abstraction that sits outside definitions of time and place, a reconfigured centrality if you like, that locates the work within a universal dimension.

Using the primary forms of a circle and a square, Bellissimo’s astrological narratives of her first Malaysian solo, “Site Specific” (TAKSU 2008), collapse into a more layered geometry. In a definitive sense these new paintings are at odds with mainstream American modernism and its lineage of artists who have worked against the conventions of the painting such as Frank Stella’s free-form canvases, Jasper John’s inverted frames or Mark Rothko’s stains, bleeds and washes. She does not seek to reinvent their formal language but rather chooses to twist and translate it as if it were an available tool.Just as Galileo turned his telescope skyward, Bellissimo pits intuition over convention. Her fiery first engagement with this tropical landscape melds journeys, memories and histories with a cathartic honesty; a sentiment echoed in this exhibition’s title, “Trust is Earned”.

While Bellissimo’s surfaces capture our immediate interest, it is the architecture of her paintings that is most remarkable as collaged fragments and soft pencil lines are caught within crystalline layers of resins. To achieve this spatial stacking, Bellissimo has for the first time cut-out circles from wood and Plexiglas structures and then ‘rebuilt’ the canvas with translucent films. It is a device that acts in perforating the surface, creating eddies and tensions that blur external and internal space.

On occasion Bellissimo has additionally left the stretcher bars exposed creating a paradoxical depth that pushes and pulls between dimensionality and perspective. We are fooled into questioning, “Is this object in front of the other or compressed into a single layer?” Take as example the frame of “Blue Moon on Earth” (2009) that hovers below the translucent surface and divides the painting into ghostly quadrants. It plays an active role in the painting’s visual, as well as physical, structure.

This device of dissecting the canvas into quadrants Bellissimo visits across the exhibition. It assists in playing off opposites: square and circle, black and white, void and presence or, in the most oblique sense, Western astral technology against Asian mysticism. Contraries are held in balance. The eclipse becomes a metaphor mirroring Bellissimo’s own life journey, a visual cue that is referenced in a suite of three black and white paintings titled “Eclipse of the Moon” (2009). In them the movement of the sun across the moon is recorded in repeated drawn arcs submerged below veils of resin, locked in stasis.

While the picture-plane is engineered by Bellissimo to unsettle our perceptions of painting, these canvases maintain that romance of astral gazing inspired by Galileo. Shimmery interference colours and phosphorescent pigments add to the translucence of the Plexiglas, what has been described as ‘a starry night effect’, a turgid atmospheric sea of gesture and texture. It is beautifully illustrated in the work, “Three Phases of the Moon” (2009) where streams of aerosol enamels and iridescent hues of violet lift the work off the wall.

It has been said that Bellissimo pitches colour against depth. One can witness this reverberation in the painting “Trust is Earned: Yellow Sun” (2009) where small circles are caught deep in the resin’s layers, effectively playing with the meniscus or edge between volume and form. This flutter is equally found in the paintings “Lunas Veritas I” (2009) and “Trust is Earned: Silver Moon” (2009) where collaged elements work to build texture and depth. As marks overlap and are abstracted, life wells from within these works. They have the whimsy and intrigue of peering into a rock pool, its mirror-like surface catching the light yet rendering it impossible to gauge their depth. As Bellissimo explains, “I am always thinking about what makes up the depth of any shade…[and] its ‘reflection’ of a shade.” These are spirited paintings.

It is a natural progression then that Bellissimo continues to push her process and available technology to explore the sensorial interplay between sight and sound. Just as Galileo liberated how we view the universe, Bellissimo expands the painterly experience to include touch and sound. These paintings lead to a new series of works that emit music composed by Bellissimo with rap-style poetics and projected in an intimate decibel begging intimacy. She redefines the boundaries of the artist / viewer relationship.

Bellissimo’s works are intellectually searching and solid, yet their physical presence is apparently weightless. Brushing ones eyes across this body of paintings we are awash with stimulation – seduction – permitted to dream amidst the stars. Such vulnerability of letting go is indeed a trust earned.

Gina Fairley, March 2009