Ana Lucia Cano’s Practical Answers to Impossible Questions
Ana Lucia Cano’s upcoming exhibition at NoHo House, Practical Answers to Impossible Questions, is a continuation of a project started in 2018, that began as an imaginary conversation between the artist and her soon-to-be-born son. He would ask impossible questions and she would respond with practical, simple answers.
While the questions are abstract, serious, philosophical, transcendental, and timeless; the answers are specific, colorful, and quotidian. The questions are meant to be universal and absolute, while the answers are anecdotal. In most cases the answers resonate with feelings and characters that influenced Cano’s life and artwork.
Cano’s semi-abstract work is influenced by a childhood lived between a city at war (Medellin) and the magic vitality of her grandmother’s farm; between the discipline of a strict school, and the warm carefree days of coffee plantations. Her compositions use intricate work to reconcile the tension between pairs of opposites (agony and sublimation, vulnerability and power, black and white).
Before she embarked on a journey of self-discovery as a visual artist, Ana Lucia Cano studied and practiced architecture in the United States, Austria, Canada and Colombia. She earned a Masters in Architectural Design from Columbia University and opened her own boutique practice in New York City. Architecture’s influence on Cano’s art can be clearly felt through her composition strategies and line work; one is directed through a visual riddle, lost and found in detail. She makes bold use of formal and thematic juxtapositions that arouse the viewer’s power of imagination.
Writing and drawing are the genesis of Cano’s paintings; she regards herself, foremost, as a storyteller. Her graphic narrations with dizzyingly sophisticated patterns, sensual figures and textures verge on the humorous and erotic. Cano’s haunting characters are depicted in constant movement against busy textures and backgrounds. Bodies, animals, shapes and portraits, either in ink or acrylic paint, are mapped carefully with bittersweet expressions that forge new relationships with her unconscious and her own history.