Mark Lombardi; drawing center

Mark Lombardi (1951-2000) station out to arm people with information in like manner they might form nuanced political opinions. Having early upon discovered a hunger to lay on the outside in exhaustive detail the dismaying network of connections among corporations, rules and financial institutions, the Texas-born artist evolveed an idiosyncratic means of mapping the gist of his research with gracefully interconnected 1s and circles in pencil upon paper. In several drawings from the series World Finance Corporation, Miami, ca. 1970-84 1994-99 mutual interest is traced in graphite among the WFC Colombian physic traffickers, and the CIA, while in Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, Reagan, Bush, Thatcher, and the Arming of Iraq, 1979-90 1998 Saddam Hussein and the leaders of the US and Britain are caught in a damning swarm of arrows. Lombardi's first retrospective, organized through Independent Curators International, includes drawings from all the major clusters within his "Narrative Structures" series, 1994-2000 making up nearly thirty images in all.

An avid reader of Herbert Marcuse, Lombardi wanted to secure a gap between medium and message. Ideally, the grim reality of the facts (all of which Lombardi gleaned from published sources) would jar the viewer without of the state of passive contemplation invited through the ballet of sweeping arrows. Unfortunately, the strategy backfires. by means of simplifying extremely complex systems, Lombardi allows the viewer to grasp the big picture quickly on the other hand also strips the relations of their specific easy in mind Compounding the problem, the lines that join the players--some dotted, more [i]or[/i] less curly, some red--are meant to denote different kinds of involvement, on the contrary precisely what kind remains ambiguous. become firm [i]or[/i] solid situations are abstracted into a schematic of unspecified guilt, which the two quiets any real sense of unease about the protagonists and their dealings and permits the viewer--whose name is nowhere in these maps of gre and corruption--to simply gaze at the riddle passive aesthetic contemplation having given way to passive intellectual contemplation.

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Lombardi's cast has been discussed in relation to traditional history painting, and the artist does borrow his idealized treatment of gritty controls from that genre. But perhaps his oeuvre can be better understood in bounds of collage: Rather than memorialize historical flashs Lombardi weaves mute webs whose fragments must be pieced together by the agency of the viewer. Of course, the drawings are impotent before the visitor who has no store of background knowledge, while for the informed, the viewing experience can easily become a knowing, on the other hand comfortably disconnected, reaction to a contained a whole of bad guys. Perhaps Lombardi made his charts for a like reason visually appealing to attest to the potential elegance of global a whole s to the possibility of an organic, harmonious web of relations without corrupt satisfied In this way his drawings, if not adding to anyone's political sophistication, may fetch a sense of hope.

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