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Wednesday, April 23, 2008 Italy as it is: Richard Lasner’s photographs On View | Claudia Rousseau
Photo courtesy of the artist In ‘‘Fila di Gondole,” a row of gondolas docked on the canal provided the opportunity for a nearly perfect study in form and color contrasts. 
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If the sinking dollar has put a wrench in your travel plans, ‘‘Italian Pleasures,” now at the Waverly Gallery in Bethesda, may be the next best thing. In a unique way, Richard Lasner’s photographs contain a sense of the Italian experience at its unchanging core. It is well worth your while to see this group of large-format images to see that essence captured.
Lasner has made three relatively short pilgrimages to Italy, exploring regions off the beaten path such as Piemonte in the north, and Puglia in the south, as well as Tuscany, the Veneto and Rome. Each trip has resulted in a ‘‘gallery of photos.” Although the artist has never lived in the country for an extended period, they show his ability to find the universal and the eternal in this place — the bedrock beneath the glitter of contemporary change — retaining each region’s specific character. Lasner has an unfailing eye for composition and color values; there is nothing superfluous in any of these images. With compositions so tight that every detail contributes to the whole, the photographs convey the sensibility of the unbroken reality of a centuries-old culture that has long held art at the center of ordinary living, often in the little things of the everyday that create the visual landscape.
The richness of color in these prints is part of the secret. Lasner’s works, which he calls ‘‘photographic watercolor prints,” are taken on Kodak Portra film, permitting a very fine grain at all shutter speeds that he uses to full advantage. They are professionally scanned into a printer that jets archival water-based inks onto coated paper, allowing the artist a high degree of control over the color density. This process, and Lasner’s unusually acute sensibility to nuances of light, shade and complementary colors, produce an extraordinary body of work. Even at enlarged format (most prints in the show are 20 by 30 inches), the prints reveal detail and convey local color, so much a part of seeing Italy as it is, without digital enhancement.
Among the individual images, it’s difficult to select the most striking, although the pictures from Venice are certainly contenders. I was stopped by ‘‘Il Gondoliere,” which shows a lone gondolier steering his boat around a sharp curve in the canal. This is just the kind of image that could have been banal in other hands. Instead, because of the precision of the composition and lighting, it becomes a perfectly structured study in form and color.
The deep perspective view of ‘‘Il Gondoliere” frames two blue windows. The shape of the lower one is echoed in the windows of the buildings closest to the viewer on either side of the gondolier. The shape of the upper one is repeated twice on the right. Their nearly turquoise blue color is repeated in the curtain of the arched window on the upper left, a small ceramic direction sign on the right and a painted seat inside the boat. These create a visual triangle that locks these parts of the composition together. The blue is set against the pink, tan and complementary orange tones of the walls. In subjective terms, there’s an eloquent silence in this image of a parka-wearing gondolier steering his boat with a long pole, the same way it has been done for centuries, so ordinary and yet so particular.
Similarly, in ‘‘Finestre riflesse” (Reflected windows) and ‘‘Fila di Gondole” (Row of Gondolas), we get the look and feel of Venice without the schmaltzy edge. The former has compositional effects much like those just described of carefully echoing forms, while the latter is like a painting. It seems impossible to have just found this scene so perfectly arranged with its horizontal series of curved boats contrasting with the verticals of their poles that link with the verticals of the canal lamppost and the windows and arched doorway in the wall behind. The reflected blue of the gondola covers mingles with golden highlights in the afternoon view of the Grand Canal.
Lasner is good at reflections. There’s even a print with nothing but the shimmering reflection of a white church in the rippling water.
In Puglia, Lasner found a drier and harsher environment that nevertheless contains moments of extraordinary color. In the simple but compelling ‘‘Barche Blu,” two blue boats lie idle in the bright afternoon sun. The boats contain all three primaries: red, yellow and blue, plus white. These stand out boldly against the beige tones of the curved wall beyond. The wall’s curve begins a symphony of formal correspondences: the arch of the partially opened door echoing the curve of first boat’s prow, the lines of the stairs’ grated balustrade repeated in their shadows and in the stones of the wall on the left that contains the scene.
Two views in the Abruzzo, also on the southern Adriatic coast, capture delicate light effects that give an especially strong tactile feeling to the prints. In ‘‘Albero e la sua ombra: Anversa degli Abruzzi” (Tree and its shadow), a bent tree casts its shadow on an ancient wall in the town of Anversa. The shadows’ light gray pattern contrasts with the stones of the wall, again, in a tightly framed view. A curved street in the same town (‘‘Strada Curva”) was shot on an early Sunday morning — without the cars, dogs, strollers, trash and people that often make photography like this in Italy so difficult. It reminds me of Hopper, devoid of human presence in places where it’s nevertheless implied. Here, and in a number of other prints, Lasner’s practice allows the viewer a special place, a perspective of privilege.
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