Louisville, Kentucky – I saw the paintings of Lori Larusso for the first time in 2004, when she was a graduate student of the MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (Mica) and I ended my last semester of teaching. Before leaving, I did something unprecedented for me: I bought two of his paintings. One portrays a horn of melting chocolate ice cream with a childish face, placed upside down on a dish, and the other was two frozen coconut cakes against a creamy white soil. What made them more than strong paintings of a talented graduate student is that Larusso had transparent lush, flat and unmixed acrylic paint with his interest in consumption, waste, gratification and leisure, which led to graphically precise representations of anthroporph desserts.
After leaving Mica, I stayed in touch with Larusso and I followed him on Facebook and Instagram, but I did not see her work in person before 2023, when I visited Louisville, where she had moved to teaching. She had made a name for herself in the city, and while I was in town, I saw her wall installation, “a pastiche of good intentions and other parties” (2019), in sight in the hall of the Kmac contemporary art museum. Although food has been a line through its art in the past two decades, it is clear that it has explored different possibilities, because it has become more follower as a painter.
When I returned to Louisville last February for the Louisville conference on literature and culture, I stayed an additional day to stop at the Larusso studio. During the morning, I saw three workforce, two completed and one in progress for its first museum exhibition, A paradox of abundanceOpening at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts on August 26. Contemplating the control of the color relationships of Larusso in tandem with its long concern of consumption and waste, I remember the amount of interesting art that I saw in different cities that I visited as a poet, and how few things are shown on the two coasts.
“Bourbon Rocks on Red” (2025) characterizes the formal installations of Larusso with color, which includes a strain of its art. Located against a red floor and throwing a brown shadow, the cylindrical glass is composed of red, pink, brown, brown and nested shapes, superimposed with small white accents. “Bourbon Rocks on Red” is both a tactile and perceptual surface which is comfortably found on the division line between abstraction and representation without promoting both sides. This and other paintings in this series reminded me of the line of the great poem of John Ashbery, “Rondest Rentimed”: “a kind of fence-sitting / high in terms of an aesthetic ideal”.
For his series Ladyface Vase (1 – 14) (2024), Larusso represents flowers in painted ceramic vases originally manufactured by the ceramist and artist of California Betty Lou Nichols, who began to create chief cinema actresses at his kitchen table in the late 1940s. These ceramic caricatures have become so popular in a given time, she had two dozen employees, and Eliminations before fashion was soothed in the late 1960s.
Nichols followed a formula: each face had large black eyelashes hiding slammed eyes and a highly red mouth. In the skins of Larusso, the bouquets rising from their elaborate hairstyles or their beautiful heads sometimes flourish and other times wither or dry. Representing a Euro-American ideal of beauty and glamor, the faces were based on well-known Hollywood actresses such as Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe.
Formally, as for Bourbon glasses, Larusso flowers are an exploration of color relationships. But the head vase paintings also transmit its interest in the dynamics of power between women and men, the male gaze and the way in which the notion of refinement of society can make a consumer want to have a modeling object on a cinema actress, someone who is essentially a fantastic figure.
Larusso is a socially and politically conscious artist, but she never announces her intentions. Its conceptualization of particular themes – from the adaptation of wild animals to human environments where food is widely accessible to the ways we disguise and decorate food – can be funny and disturbing, as if to organize broccoli rods to make a canned canilee, which we see in the installation “a pastiche of good intentions and other parts. “”
What has changed in the past 20 years is the interest in deepening Larusso for the way the consumer society treats food and images so that they become substitutes and substitutes. In the rigorous and urgent prosecution of this concern, it depicts an increasingly focused world of false promises.
In “Midden” (2025), Larusso represents a dead deer whose open stomach reveals a bunch of waste. Taking an impassive approach, its unlikely, catchy and catchy grotesque juxtaposition is both comical and dark. An in-depth examination of the trash can reveals a computer keyboard, a plastic fork, a plastic cover, a pitch wrapped in plastic, a Kleenex box, a waffle, a lipstick and a sneaker with chewing gum stretched on its sole. Because some of these things are more readable than others, the eye must constantly refocus. Larusso has reversed the Trope of Consumer Nature of Humanity in the involuntary consumption of the deer of human manufacturing waste.
Likewise, “Binge and Purge” (2025) depicts a mound of articles stacked under a vertically orientation basket. At the top of the triangular mound is a teddy bear divided and rid of keys, a packet of condoms, a screwdriver and money. The other things include a sculpted pumpkin, a cup of take -out coffee, a coffee maker, work gloves and a container of tights. Are these goods that someone has just bought or ordering? With its attention to packaging, Larusso suggests that in the consumption and waste cycle which is at the heart of each civilization, capitalism has reversed the relationship by serving more indestructible waste than it puts in fashion.
