Laura Lima does a fantastic job in exploring our perceptual space with her latest opening Six Feet Over at Tanya Bonadkdar Gallery in Los Angeles, CA. The artist makes a fastidious effort to draw us in while protruding us outward with her playfulness with the tactile senses. I am always fond of an artist which seeks to promote the subjective experience of touch. It is one of the last bastions in the Fine Arts which overcomes the sacredness of European Fine Arts History, and the emphasis of avoiding the blemishing of oily hands and sun-stained wrinkles of mortality to promote the teasing play of tangible feeling.

Communal Nest #1
2021. Straw, wood and thread 100 3/8 x 57 7/8 x 64 1/8 inches; 255 x 147 x 163cm. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles

And this is all accomplished with her myriads of techniques of such protraction. And how exquisite it is that our intuition is permitted to experience basket-weaving in works such as Communal Nest #1 without actually needing to grapple with the artwork in our grasps at perfection. It is through our mind’s eye, the imaginative space which integrates our memories of hand-weaving which provides not so much a jarring, but a trouncing enticement of looking yonder at what must be forever outside our clutches. This permeates a conduct of demanding higher, and it is terrific to experience Ms. Lima’s artwork as vertically displayed to augment such a judgment of needing a sensible experience of, as Herr Eric Voeglin noted, The Beyond, penetrating the mystery of the future-present.

Laura Lima
‘Gladstone waving between two symmetric mountains’.
2019 Fabric, thread, wood, paint
40 x 34 1/4 x 3 inches; 101.6 x 87 x 7.6 cm. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles

Texture is also delectably found in her canvasses. Her choice of not simply fabric, but of the patterns themselves, brings to life a sense of permanent place – truly the intention of Western Fine Arts as it has categorically been received by the Pagan high-worship of immortal souls, leading to Hellenic men to sacrifice their lives to preserve the integrity of an artisanal statute to protect an eternal connection with the divine. And yet, notice how the retention of such significance can be achieved so modestly in industrial society, to leave us with a pleasant respite of meditation of tenderness from the gentle crafting of her fabrics. And it is precisely the tenderness garnered from the neutral tones which provides us with the possibility to focus on the geometry at play, rather than an inebriated Crayola intensity which would make us saunter around the fact that there resides an extensiveness with the tactile playfulness. It must be remarked, in such works as Gladstone waving between two asymmetric mountains, there is a silent occupation which is only discoverable once we recognize the solid form as a beautiful realization of its necessity in the human perception of space. For so much of coloring is an experience of an expression of sensual emotion, the cerebral modesty of finiteness is gracefully captured if the subject is willing to participate in the artist’s mystery of this ethereal yet physical presence.