David Totah in discussion with Ida Panicelli

DT
How did you meet Lauretta and how did you connect?
 
IP
Oh my God, from the beginning? We first met in the mid-70s in New York through mutual friends. We reconnected at the end of the 70s when I was curating the show ‘Minimal Art’ at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome from the Panza di Biumo collection. I went to visit her and Donald Judd in their country house near Rome. Donald’s work was included in that show together with Bob Morris and Carl Andre. Then I visited them again several times in New York and had dinner at Donald’s studio/loft. It was a very friendly atmosphere. At that time Lauretta was living with Donald in Marfa, and was starting her early watercolors, deeply influenced by the light and landscape of Texas. When she finally had her own loft on Greene Street in the mid-80s I started to visit her studio regularly. We spent a long time looking at the paintings and she would explain the compositions and her choice of colors. She was very particular about the brands, she was extremely meticulous about all technical details. Her work table was beautiful, filled with all the color tests.
 
DT
Describe your interaction when she was showing you the works and did she express a willingness to have them exhibited publicly?
 
IP
She used to have a gallery at the time but mostly private collectors and museum curators came to the house. She had been included in the Whitney Biennial so curators visited her often. I never met anyone with her because we were very private when we were together; we had a lot to talk about such as the books that she read, the music she was listening to. She was particularly fond of Vivaldi’s Gloria. She loved how the first part of it was so uplifting; it had to do with cherubims rejoicing and celebrating the glory of the Lord. The second part became so somber because it had to do with coming down to earth. She said that was what humanity is about, not about angels and the sky anymore but about being grounded by gravity and the burden of living. She would explain all the subtleties of the music and her interpretation of it. She had this extreme passion to understand, to go into details, and she liked to share her discoveries. From music to literature or eastern mysticism, many different topics truly interested her. She was very opinionated; she could be extremely tough. She was very demanding of herself and very demanding of others. Having Lauretta as a teacher must have been very tough as she was so demanding and rigorous.
 
DT
Did she ever want to become an architect?
 
IP
No, she never mentioned it to me. I think that she loved teaching. I also believe that the paintings themselves were her way of envisioning space. The turning point is when she discovered the Tao and chapter 11. That space where things happen, but you have to get in touch with the void to make life happen. It was a turning point for her thinking where she went very deep, reaching that state of emptiness. In the same way she was able to remove the weight of architecture; she made it light like a feather.
 
DT
Did she have a stance vis à vis women artists, and their place in the art world?
 
IP
She wasn’t a militant feminist, she was raised in a family of women who had successful careers and for her it was something very natural to be an accomplished woman without the need to make a statement about it.
 
DT
Do you know how long it would take her to make one of her drawings?
 
IP
“Un sacco di tempo!” a lot of time… it took months to make one and she usually didn’t make more than two or three series a year because the nature of the process was so time consuming; a minimal mistake would ruin the whole work. You can’t correct a watercolor. Often she had to start all over again. The hand has to be very much in control and you could feel that in her intensity. She had to be in a very solitary space, very meditative, to have that tranquility and be able to go through that subtle layering. Parts of the drawings are so transparent and to get to that point she knew every shade of the given color she was using. She was incredibly accurate.
 
DT
I would like to speak about the series of the Red Rooms which is a very important turning point in her work. What is very interesting about this series in particular is that the space becomes more enigmatic. It’s the first time she comes to an interior space with no windows. Before there were always doors and windows; in this series you see the light coming through but you don’t see any openings. It’s an enclosed space where she studies all the aspects of composition, the beams, the walls, the geometric patterns on the floor. The focus is on the center; but at the same time all the rays of light come diagonally, except for the Atrium piece where they come from the top. Those rays made the image very dynamic, all of sudden adding a centrifugal effect to it. Through those rays of light she captures impermanence because that ray will be there only at that given moment; it’s about the here and now. She spent months achieving that result.
 
DT
When and why do you think she transitioned her work from figurative to abstract?
 
IP
I remember it well, it happened in 1996 with the ‘Night’ series (included in your show). Before the ‘Night’ series the colors she used were more brilliant and luminous. That year she went deep into the dark, the night. Initially that series still had some architectural structures that looked like some prismatic shapes that were reflected on the water, there still was a hint of buildings. But in 1997 with the series ‘Orange Incandescence’, that disappears completely. The building itself is plunging into the water and all you see is a reflection of this orange light. That was the beginning of the deconstruction of architecture. She went into the darkness and the dematerialization of architecture in order to transition into the next phase. I think that ‘Orange Incandescence’ is the key work marking the transition from her figurative period to abstraction. I would like to add that it was a point of personal maturity, a process of psychological maturity that allowed her to go into that space. An exploration of the darkness, which had to do with an inner quest. This moment was nurtured by her discovery of oriental philosophies. And this was when we started discussing this topic. I was living in India at the time and I was researching in the same field.
 
DT
Was the quest, the passage into darkness followed by reaching towards the light, triggered by something that happened to her at a personal level?
 
IP
No no, it had to do with an inner quest. It came from that moment where you have to deal with your own darkness in order to become whole. You can’t expect to be a good girl and do all the right things and expect to get enlightened. You know what I mean right? We are not only luminous beings. If we don’t also accept our own dark side - without both, we would not be whole. And she was going through that kind of phase, going deep into herself and exploring; that got reflected into her work from then on.
 
DT
There is clearly a parallel quest for enlightenment through eastern philosophy and mysticism and the exploration of light within her later works.
 
IP
The way that she did it in her second phase was completely detached from the idea of building architecture. It was about concentrating on the primary qualities of light. Those prismatic shapes that I call crystals are like a disembodiment of the building. The transparent prisms were like a deconstruction of architecture. It was all about transparency and some sort of levitation.
 
DT
Do you feel that she was conscious about her ascension from a vibrational standpoint? It feels like she was getting higher and higher, which can be perceived in the chronology of her work.
 
IP
I was convinced it was conscious. During that period she was reading a lot and was voracious with books that focused on the themes of spirituality and eastern philosophies. She also had started practicing Reiki and Tai Chi, which became important for her because it was a way of grounding and finding her own center. Tai Chi is all about centering and feeling gravity. This balance between gravity and levity was exactly what she was seeking in her work. She understood it but she also experienced it in her body. It’s when you live it through your own experience, within your body, that you can share it outwardly. Those are not things you can learn through books. Having had her own experience of the body in gravity and levity allowed her to translate it in her work.
 
DT
What was her relationship with Nature?
 
IP
Having seen her build together with her husband Peter Rowe the house by Lake Bolsena, I remember she could look at the lake and nature for hours in silence. What was impressive was how she envisioned the outside space. She had three water areas, a swimming pool, a triangular basin and a fountain. Her relationship with nature was an intimate dialogue with the space. She conceived the outside areas as she did the interiors, with a strict intention to respect the balance of nature. Everything was driven by this harmony, which she applied in all of the aspects of her life, something she was not able to live without, just the perfect balance that respected the integrity of spaces.
She poured a lot of attention into designing her fountains, she went to look at all the fountains in Rome to recreate the ones which would fit her house perfectly. Water played a very important role in her private life as well as in her watercolors. She explores the continent of water , and with the ‘Night’ series water became an ocean, a metaphor for the Universe.
 
DT
What would you say was the first book that opened the door to eastern philosophy?
 
IP
I believe that the Tao Te Ching was definitely the one, as it was for me. When you experience it, you become it. We both loved Steven Mitchell’s translation because he referred to the Master as a he or a she, something that was never done before. The empowerment of the feminine was enormous in that book. Beyond the fact of how women artists were treated, women in the spiritual world were also very poorly regarded. That book was crucial for both of us, particularly chapter 11. That chapter is all about discovering the empty space inside. It’s something we are usually really scared of. We tend to fill our lives with things, objects and people just to avoid going there. We are scared of the unknown, but if we don’t make that jump into the unknown, we will never understand existence. I would even venture to say you would never understand architecture. She took that plunge and she wasn’t scared. Practicing Zen for many years allowed me to see so many people that were afraid of that void, because it’s about the removal of all our masks. It has to do with our image we have of ourselves and how much we do to protect that image. The energy we spend hiding, the number of lies we tell to protect ourselves and maintain that image. The moment you peel that off, you are naked, exposed, and you reach your true self.