Mayumi Luppi

Brazilian painter Mayumi Luppi crafts abstract visions from raw material of monochromatic quadrangles. Using these forms as medium and canvas, she creates architectures that alternately comfort, confound and energize. Over and through these emotional shapes, Luppi threads and floats curved, spotted and sprawling forms. Some match individual artworks' titles, others interact playfully with their mosaic backdrops, tempering impressions of flatness with texture and depth. If Luppi's works initially evoke Piet Mondrian with carefully balanced grids and pates, Fernand Leger's paintings have more similar effects.

Luppi flirts with figuration and perspective, super-imposing and peeling her square planes at their edges, but never completely indulging our instinctual search for identifiable referents. Rather, she leads us over her flattened spaces towards refuges where abstraction seems to nearly give into representation. Sometimes these places are easy to find, in other works they are small and fleeting. In either situation, Luppi's explorations at the border of depth and flatness provoke searches that always engage the eye.