Luisa Rossitto by Angela Goddard

Luisa Rossitto’s watercolours juxtapose images from popular culture to invoke improbable fantasies, playing on beauty, desire and the decorative. The prompt for her latest works Day of the dodo and Way of the dodo was an anecdote about the highlanders of Papua New Guinea using the plumage of the male bird of paradise as currency. Rossitto began by considering “the idea of being punished for being beautiful, which then segued into contemplation of human abuse of nature.” To create these two large works, which are on a much grander scale than her earlier vignettes, Rossitto collaged her drawings in Photoshop; layering, resizing, cutting and pasting, then scaled up the compositions into large-format watercolours.

In this festive theatre of violence, humans attack a bird of paradise piñata adorned with spitting snakes. In Day of the dodo, a dodo skeleton lingers near topless Amazons, mixtures of Wonder Woman and Diana, Roman goddess of the hunt and an emblem of chastity, shooting fire arrows into the coloured morass. In Way of the dodo, four men in ruby-red cowboy boots display their ‘weapons’ to piss, or perhaps circle jerk, onto the skeleton of another hapless dodo. It is clear that each of these elements is suggesting ironic impotence as much as apocalypse. As Rossitto says, “I had been thinking about the end of the world as we know it as really just being the beginning of a new era in time; a flattening of the playing field so that a new species can become dominant.”

A striking connection can be made with the reclusive artist and writer Henry Darger (1892–1973) whose works, rendered in pencil and watercolour and only discovered after his death, charted a fantasy world in which girls fought an epic battle for their freedom against armies of sadistic men. Like Darger, Rossito’s image repertoire is collaged from sources including advertising and comic books, and their use seems to elevate these familiar figures into an arcane allegory. But while Darger’s appropriated popular sources were absorbed into the logic of his own crazed and self-enclosed fantasy world, Rossitto constructs her allegories as preposterous conceits.

Despite its iconography, Rossitto’s clean and stylised neoclassical aesthetic profoundly lacks violence. She tests her elements, invoking their symbolic measure, but at the same time plays out the slackness of their associations. The resulting tableaux ironises its own signification by first implying an allegorical language, and then confusing its deployment. Rossitto’s emblems are both ancient and contemporary, encompassing the usually chaste huntress Diana in ruffled panties, as well as a flower motif drawn from the logo of the ever-expanding multinational oil company BP (British Petroleum), all placed in the futurist context of human fate. But perhaps her most disturbing allegorical leitmotifs are her expressionless human subjects. Engaged in apocalyptic conflict, they are neither violent nor erotic. As Rossitto says, “The women senselessly fight fire with fire, the men reach for their proudly inadequate weaponry.” Rossitto’s watercolours thus summon the symbology of grand themes, only to suspend them in absurdity.

Angela Goddard