By Leah Ollman, Special To The Times.
Los Angeles Times. Friday, January 12,
2001
Andrew Moore's stunning photographs of once-grand buildings and interior
spaces in Havana read easily as metaphors for the exhausted condition of Cuba's
revolution, its ideals more than a little worn around the edges. But Moore's
photographs at Craig Krull Gallery are sensed more than they are read. Though
filled with visual information--and by extension, economic, political and social
cues--they make their appeal to the mind only after their rich color and
exquisite texture enrapture the senses.
In "Marisol" (1999), a young girl, barefoot, sits in a fraying
chair reading a book. Her presence in the lower right corner of the image
anchors a vast and spare space. The floor is cool stone tile, the wall a
symphony of decay, its paint and decorative plaster work peeling, buckling,
crumbling, growing green and slick with mold. Young and beautiful, the girl is
not just anchor in the space but antidote to its decline. Her skin is smooth and
new; her face glows with a warm light cast, it seems, by the pages of her
leather-bound book.
In another image, this time an exterior, the New York-based Moore again
sets the freshness of youth against architecture that has grown overripe. "El
Centro de Oro" (2000) shows two children, each holding the end of a jump
rope and standing on a balcony of a lovely Art Nouveau building. Its elegant
lines and sinuous ironwork remain, but its surface has grown slack with age.
Moore is a practical preservationist with a romantic soul. His
photographs document a spirit of resourcefulness and graceful persistence
beneath a veneer of loss and nostalgia. The spectacular interior of the "Campo
Amor" (1999) speaks simultaneously of its glorious past as a theater and
its present function as a parking lot for motorbikes and pedicab taxis. A
makeshift laundry line hangs behind the balcony seats. A crusty layer of rubble
on the ground acts as a corresponding bookend to the frail roof, a skeletal web
of beams no longer dense enough even to shade the interior, much less shelter
it. Like sustained echoes, Moore's photographs keep the bold music of these
spaces alive and resonating.
* Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa
Monica, (310) 828-6410, through Saturday. |
