For his second solo exhibition with the gallery, Lou Laurita presents fifteen large scale gouache paintings of imagery meticulously rendered within text. As the title suggests, the exhibition is organized around three forms of language found online: personal profiles, affirmations (or positive assertions/declarations,) and popular song lyrics. Imagery includes portraits of drunken couples, small disasters, Victorian botanicals, and coloring book illustrations. His collaging of the textual and the visual is arranged in an intuitive manner that employs the associative possibilities between visual perception and the interpretation of language. However, Laurita goes beyond challenging the way we seek and understand meaning by focusing on the emotional charge of words and the mystery of representation. In this way, the works act as verbal sledgehammers, creating a lexicon in which ideas such as beauty and brutality are pressed into one. Laurita addresses the impetus for the exhibition is a recent statement:

We create profiles of ourselves for various sites on the internet…We can be in control of how we want to be perceived, we can be honest about who we are, or we can indicate what might be bristling under the surface…It’s a blanket of words to crawl under when the reality of that loneliness can bring our stories to a predictable conclusion. So we ask for the physical extremes: to dominate or be dominated, to maintain control or succumb, being completely vulnerable and willing to do whatever it takes to be touched, acknowledged, noticed, included…We ask for love and companionship or maybe just a dinner out and we describe how we’ve been hurt in the past and how empty this culture seems and the impossibility of making a lasting connection. We write the lyrics to our favorite song or the song that best describes how we feel right now or that describes an emotion we can’t put into our own words. And with all that description is an image. A picture of you and your bar friends, of you and a girlfriend drunk, or you at Gay Disney, or your asshole, or your hard on, or you in full leather, or your kitten, or you covered in the semen of a group of men, or you at your brother’s wedding, or a drawing of the type of sex you want to have, or a Victorian botanical, or your favorite painting, or a comic book character. And in many profiles there are affirmations, there is hope, and there is beauty in that longing that connects us. There’s a party going on. The party we sometimes assume we’re not invited to…There’s a party going on and we see images posted of the party that has happened…I am a participant, looking in the mirror and telling myself what I want, trying to make a wish a reality. An affirmation which works with the predictability of a crap shoot in a cyber universe where I pray to be grounded and whole, imagine there’s no heaven, want you to love me forever, and to fuck me as hard as you can, all in the same paragraph.

Laurita was recently commissioned by Visual AIDS to create a broadside comprised of 4” x 6” stickers, postcards, and downloadable 8.5” x 11” posters; for more information, please visit http://www.thebody.com/visualaids/current/broadsides2007.html.