Susan Logoreci’s new cityscape drawings at Cirrus are more self-assured than ever, yet far less reassuring. The formal buoyancy and elastic perspective that have given the work an unshackled charm now make it feel portentous. Not all of the drawings are psychically daunting, but the best of them are profoundly so.

Consider the most gripping work, the 4-foot-by-10-foot “Central Park (Ye Know Not the Day Nor the Hour).” Logoreci’s view is elevated and slightly skewed. Dense, chunky buildings drawn in colored pencil as solid planes punctuated by irregular grids of windows frame the park in a Manhattan palette of concrete gray, brick, black, pale stone and mustard. The density is uninterrupted, which makes the park’s absence all the more stunning. The city’s central core of green, its breathing space, its organic antidote to human ambition is gone. Erased. A stark white blank. A formidable silence. That the shape of the park resembles the shadow of a tower is unlikely coincidental.

Pairing the L.A. artist’s drawings with a short film by her San Francisco-based brother, Thomas Logoreci, reinforces the theme of sudden doom. The film, “9/10,” an account of the events of the evening before waking up “on the other side of history,” is a poignant, unpolished meditation on tragedy, estrangement and serendipity.

A sense of tenuousness pervades both the film and the drawings. Only one of the drawings captures a scene of actual destruction, buildings imploding and fragments flying, but all trade on the experience of destabilization, from the carnivalesque to the cataclysmic.

Cirrus, 542 S. Alameda St., (213) 680-3473, through June 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.cirrusgallery.com

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Publication: LA Times

Publication date: 20/06/2008