CITYSCAPES

Layla Fanucci's cityscapes capture this paradox of the city as both magnificent and daunting. In her paintings, each based on a specific city, she creates a vision of architecture piled up into a dense mass of impacted forms. The individual buildings maintain a tenuous grip on their own identities, much as the populace of the painted cities seems subsumed by the huge forms looming above them. Fanucci's cities have an undeniable grandeur, from the arching colossus of the Eiffel Tower, to the powerful curve of a bridge with the skyscrapers of Manhattan beyond. Even in her depictions of places steeped in traditions, such as Rome, Venice, and Istanbul, the splendor of the city rings clear, as the habitat that cultures build both to shelter and to celebrate themselves. On large canvases, Fanucci establishes shifting fields of color, over which she paints networks of linear brush strokes, which coalesce into the forms and patterns of the city. The intuitive directness of her approach, its painterly energy, and graphic invention all bespeak both the hyped-up excess of urban experience and something more intensely personal, expressive of the artist and her inner world. The brush strokes are both descriptive and urgent, the color ranging from melancholy to fiery. The resulting images are diverse in character, attesting to the multiplicity of urban life and the human moods which these images seem to embody. Fanuccis challenge was to develop a style of painting that no one paints, in the world. She found that style layering city on top of city. Layering color, then painting the architectural design in black oil, another layer of color and another city. 

Fanucci's paintings have been exhibited in many galleries and museums. Notably, The Walter Wickiser Gallery in New York, The Christopher Hill Gallery in Saint Helena, Andrews Art Museum in North Carolina, Chasen Gallery in Virginia, Le Musee de Marrakech in Morocco, Jayson Samuel Gallery, Lisa Freedman Fine Arts, 750 Wines Studio, VAM Art Inc. Gallery. She has received many commissions and her work is in numerous private collections.