Francesca Gabbiani
Hot Panoramas

“No place on Earth offers greater security to life and greater freedom from natural disasters than Southern California.” — Los Angeles Times, 1934

Hot Panoramas. What more can you ask for? The title of Los Angeles-based artist Francesca Gabbiani’s present exhibition could be the tagline for a holiday in paradise, promising therapeutic heat after a long and cold winter; panoramic vistas, of unbroken views of a whole region, to revive the soul. And yet, as Los Angeles oscillates between uncontrollable wildfires that incinerate homes, animals, and humans, and snowstorms that were unthinkable two decades ago, the title takes on another set of meanings: hot can also mean life at high voltage, on the edge of being burned alive; relaxing with a panoramic view might be the decadent end of West Coast leisure, but it may also be the hell that we cannot escape. Gabbiani’s new series of works, all made between 2022 and 2023, operate at the threshold between a world that is hospitable and an ecology of terror, between beauty and death, between Eden and its Fall. Part of a generation of North American artists who have managed to find genuinely innovative ways of aligning formal innovation with ecological critique, Gabbiani’s compelling collages manage to never aestheticize disaster but rather appeal to the pictorial representation of our environments that are on the cusp of being lost. Her landscapes burn bright as the world is on fire.

Gabbiani has developed a singular practice for our troubled moment, organising her work around layers of densely hand-cut paper in shimmeringly evocative colour. This body of work stands as one of the most compelling commentaries on ecological disaster in our ever more vulnerable, precarious, and persevering cities. The present works on show at Cedric Bardawil have been organised around four co- implicated series: ‘Mutation’, ‘Hot Panorama’, and ‘Phosflorescence’, and one work titled ‘Apocalypse RN’, which temporally locates us to the fact that the end is happening––colloquially, environmentally––right now. Each work speaks to the unmistakable landscapes that contain Los Angeles, Malibu, and Santa Monica, while also gesturing out to the realms of the pure imagination: the places that populate speculative fiction, like Platonic forms on acid sprinting across a sandy desert, as well as the Romantic tradition in painting and poetry of depicting the untethered fires that consume at scale, and at the outer reaches of human capability to contain or subdue them.

In this way, this series feels as though it manages to contain both the singular landscapes of Southern California and the more global histories of environmental degradation and wildfire. At the time that I was spending time with Gabbiani’s new works on paper, I visited Tate Britain and was reacquainted with J. M. W. Turner’s watercolour hellscape, The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, c.1834–5. It’s an incandescent vision of symbolic proportions: the seat and symbol of British democracy is overpowered by flames as the distraught onlookers seem redder than the fires themselves. Gabbiani’s works might not share the same attention to the depiction of specific historical events (here, the House of Commons and Lords Fires on 16–17 October 1834) but they manage to compel something of Turner’s subject as old orders are swept away; and how the subliminal scale of fires decimating the built structures that we use for government, worship, and housing have been such a compelling subject for artists throughout the modern period.

In Mutation XLVII, 2023, two overlaid sectional pieces of paper depicting palm trees shout across to one another in a discordant call-and-response. The incredibly fine incisions of layered paper create a silhouette effect in ferocious colour, set against a total blackness that is broken by spray paint, conjuring an enigmatic, flickering patterning of light. In the trees, we see a riotous and kaleidoscopic disturbance of reggae green, crimson red, golden flax yellow, and the kind of orange that illuminates the sunset hours on one of those intransigently late summer dusks in Los Angeles, after the white heat of summer has formed a cool atmosphere of light-polluted brilliance. This work is a perfect embodiment of Gabbiani’s ability to affect our heads and eyes in different ways. The fact that the palm trees seem so explicitly on fire, the only light-source in a world of darkness, invites us to see this as a profound work of ecocritical art inspired by the extreme weather conditions of Los Angeles in recent debates and a sign that these images of temperate paradise are now consumed by an inhospitable present. And yet, Mutation XLVII is a feast for the eyes: if, in a thought experiment, we manage to strip ourselves of what we know and fear from the ecological crisis that consumes us, this is a profoundly beautiful work that is animated by a singular use of colour, a brittle composition that seems to be enraptured by irrepressible movement, a landscape of the not-too-distant future. To this writer at least the side-by-side configuration recalls Salvador Dalí’s Burning Giraffes in Brown, also known as Giraffe Avignon, 1975, produced in pastel and watercolour. Compare two aspects: first, the way a sense of balanced order in even numbers is overcome by an atmosphere of replicated chaos; second, how both works stand on the cusp of telling a story––we see imagined landscapes in the throes of chaos, violence, and danger––and, despite those fierce possibilities, we want to know what will happen next.

In another work from the Mutation series, numbered XLIV, 2023, Gabbiani depicts a further palm tree, but this time it is splitting apart before our eyes like a dying firecracker or the brittle parts of a dandelion blown by a nuclear wind. It’s figured alone in the wilderness, but not for much longer. The colours are ferociously wild and seemingly set on fire like the entrails of a feral child’s firework blown up high into the darkness. We can almost hear them whizz and snap. In some important respects, it reminds me of Uta Kögelsberger’s five-screen work Cull, 2022, part of the Charles Wollaston Award-winning Fire Complex project, and made in response to the September 2020 wildfires that incinerated Alder Creek, California. In all, more than 170,000 acres of Californian forest were incinerated. Half of the community lost their homes, and 40% of the giant sequoias in the Alder Creek grove were destroyed.

Where Kögelsberger’s work responds to the fires with something like documentary fidelity, Gabbiani takes us by the hand and offers us the speculative fiction of what might yet be; this is the world to be transformed, not the world as it has been. Change is constant in these works. When I spoke to Gabbiani about this powerful, new series of works, which felt to me to offer one way of beatifying the kinds of speculative fiction that Octavia Butler has written, she explained how the fictional religious novel Parable of the Sower, 1993, was a profound inspiration. ‘All that you touch you Change’, reads one section: All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God Is Change.’ These words seem to linger than an unspoken manifesto for the works in Hot Panoramas: they are studies in frenetic flux, in the power of art to change us, and the necessity for preparing as we go into ever more volatile and unpredictable futures.

In Apocalypse RN VI, 2023, Gabbiani depicts a swimming pool for the Anthropocene age. In this wincingly ersatz vision of elite leisure gone bad, the artist has pressed a highly- physicalized layer of luridly aquamarine paper on top of what is ostensibly water but resembles dense green algae so thick that it has the hard, wild texture of an overgrown lawn. Apocalypse RN VI is unmistakably Los Angeles and yet resolutely a place that exists only in Gabbiani’s prismatic memory. Notice how this creates an extraordinary sense of depth: the water has become so corroded by environmental disrepair, or else so totally reimagined by the artist in a world where the laws of physics are foreclosed by a sensorial carnival for the eyes, that it appears to have hardened in the way glacial ice has become solid out of the air. Look, too, at the endpoint of the pool: it’s merely hanging on the edge. The overgrowth has taken over in wondrously hostile spikes of dehydrated wheat. The sky itself burns with the distant hum of carbon monoxide. Gabbiani is a contemporary master of her subject and one of the very few artists working today who has taken on the environmental degradation of California with deft nuance. It’s an inverse of the calculations of speculative real estate developers like Boyle Workman, who has said: ‘Every tree, every lawn, every blade of grass in this section as it exists today, is a forced growth, made possible by man’s ingenuity in bringing water to what otherwise would be a treeless waste.’ Gabbiani’s gift is to push us into recognising that this truth offers the opposite conclusion: one day, and one day soon, nature will respond with her own logic and will render that ingenuity the very cause for the downfall of this place. Gabbiani’s Southern California is both desert and garden, both a place of dreams and the materiality of nightmares. It is close to visualising what Mike Davis, in his work Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, 1998, imagined as ‘Waldon Pond on LSD’ — a mythologised American typography seen through acid.

In Phosflorescence IV, 2023, Gabbiani depicts the outer limits of the great big blue of the Pacific. The composition of Phosflorescence, a portmanteau of ‘phosphorescence’ (to emit light or radiation without combustion or perceptive heat) and ‘florescence’ (the process of flowering), managesto combine all the beauty of the coastal world with the visual simplicity of a nightmare. The way the blue paper, seemingly stained or corroded as different hues bleed into each other, has been overlaid is ingenious and an entire fiction; extended beyond the edged logic of the seascape, we are invited into believing in this world of the imagination. In this work on paper’s treatment of a radical horizon line that animates the centralised atmosphere of things being brought into being and taken away in the same gesture, Phosflorescence IV recalls several earlier works by the artist, including Spectacle VI, 2005, which sees a fire on a body of water. Phosflorescence IV also refers to another work, one that gives the present exhibition its title, Hot Panorama, 2003, a profound meditation on the singular and yet endlessly recurring Californian wildfire: the ferocious flames lip up and across the tops of the carbonized pines, and summon up fabled Los Angeles natural disasters, such as the 2007 Griffith Park Fire, which was the first the artist saw closely and, inevitably anticipating, the 2018 Woolsey Fire, which the artist likened to ‘walking through Mordor on Kanan Road.’

In the dilapidated former glamour of Gabbiani’s collages of palm trees, swimming pools, and sun-kissed shores, I am reminded of the geographer Homer Aschmann who, in 1959, wrote that: ‘This is a landscape of desire… More than in almost any other major population concentration, people come to [Southern California] to consume the environment rather than to produce from it.’ In the delicate ferocity of Gabbiani’s collages, in the way the spectrum of colours manages to make their subject both more real and more fantastical, and in the startling juxtaposition of textured forms, we find landscapes of desire and consumption. By revising the tradition of landscape painting, complete with its conventions of impossible horizon lines touching the uncontainable subject of our immediate space, Gabbiani takes us on a journey that is simultaneously our own world and the world to come. It is both the embodied future when the coastal villas and palaces have become neglected graveyards of forms that have outlived their own death and yet, inexplicably and terrifyingly, the world outside our door. Populated by psychoactive flora and fauna and evoking the history of Californian natural disasters while also reducing its topography to essential forms that can only ever be articulated in a speculative rather than real world, Gabbiani’s collages remind me of the great English mystic and eccentric, Aleister Crowley, whose hallucinogenic poetry is animated by the same desire:

Forged by God’s fingers in His Furnace, Fate, My destiny drew near the glowing shore Where California hides her golden ore,
Her rubies and beryls …
Manifold fruits and flowers alike create Glories most unimaginable, more
Than Heaven’s own meadows match; yet this is sore.
A stain; not one of these is delicate.

In collaged stains and ferocious delicacies, evoking glory and disaster in equal measure, Gabbiani is an unmistakable artistic visionary for our troubled times.

Exhibition catalogue essay by Matthew Holman