(L.A. in London)
Francesca Gabbiani at Cedric Bardawil

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Francesca Gabbiani, Mutation XLIV (2023). Ink, gouache, acrylic, and cut paper on paper, 35 x 40.25 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Cedric Bardawil. Photo: Daniel Browne.

Reddit tells me that you’re only a true Los Angeles resident when you’ve seen seven “totems,” and once you’ve collected them all, you can never leave the city. These notable (yet ubiquitous) sights include rollerbladers in booty shorts, a dog in a stroller, and a palm tree on fire.¹ Francesca Gabbiani’s current preoccupation is this latter totem—the burning palm—a symbol that was abundant in her first solo U.K. exhibition Hot Panoramas at Cedric Bardawil this spring. Influenced by the climate crises and subsequent increase of wildfires in Southern California, Gabbiani’s idiosyncratic collaged paper scenes are apocalyptic. Her burning trees illuminate blackened skies, ocean shorelines glow with alluring yet dangerous phosphorescence, and abandoned swimming pools are cloaked in ash, now home only to plants that thrive in arid conditions. Though Gabbiani wields a knife when assembling these intricate compositions, her touch feels passive and dampened, much like humanity’s reaction to the oncoming environmental collapse.

Hot Panoramas included 11 framed works, ranging in scale (the largest was just over 5’ x 6’) and organized neatly around the modest gallery space. Many were from Gabbiani’s ongoing Hot Panoramas (2002–present) and Mutation (2018–present) series, which depict palm trees aflame, their charred fronds made from hundreds of minuscule slivers of paper, disintegrating like fireworks or shattered glass. Hot Panorama (Small) (2023) presents seven tall palms ablaze as licks of white-hot fire blow westwards into a hazy pink and gray sky. The viewer is positioned below, looking upwards at the trees towering above. Emulating a perspective that has become a ubiquitous symbol for Los Angeles in movies like Clueless (1995) and TV shows like Selling Sunset (2019–present), Gabbiani adds menace to a familiar scene. Two artists that have been influential to Gabbiani, John Baldessari, her former professor at UCLA in the mid-’90s, and Ed Ruscha, her father-in-law, also favored this perspective—both rendered palm trees and Southern California paradigms in their works. In Kissing Series: Simone. Palm Trees (Near) (1975), Baldessari plays with perspective to make it appear as if a figure is kissing a tall palm tree in the distance, and in Ruscha’s Burning Gas Station (1966–69), tendrils of flames diagonally stretch westward. Both artists use a low-angle viewpoint alongside ubiquitous L.A. iconography to suggest ominous implications. Like Ruscha and Baldessari’s trade in banal imagery of gas stations and street scenes, so too are Gabbiani’s apocalyptic subjects becoming woefully omnipresent.

In contrast to the peroxide yellows, warm ochres, and crimsons used in the Mutation series, other works in the exhibition portrayed the cool azure shades of a nighttime beach scene. Phosflorescence V (2023) (the title a portmanteau of phosphorescence and fluorescence) illustrates the crest of a wave replete with otherworldly bioluminescent hues. Blotchy blooms of paint appear illuminated by a radiant low-set moon. An effect caused by naturally occurring glowing plankton, bioluminescent waves are at once a dream and a nightmare—the warming and acidification of our oceans, combined with agricultural runoff, is exacerbating the phenomenon. The enticing aesthetics of bioluminescence, much like Gabbiani’s interpretation of it, masks its horrifying undertones—algal overgrowth, for instance, depletes the ocean’s oxygen and can lead to large-scale die-offs of fish populations. The ocean is an integral part of Gabbiani’s L.A. experience, and with its rising sea levels and bleaching corals, it is far from immune to the effects of a warming planet. In the exhibition, the ocean acts as a cool visual tonic to the blazing works from the Mutation series. As Gabbiani’s friend, writer Dana Goodyear, asserted in a joint interview published by Cultured, “fire is resolved in the ocean.”² The two elements are fundamentally connected and mutually destructive; water extinguishes fire and fire boils water away to nothing.

Gabbiani was compelled to start making the fire pieces after experiencing destructive wildfires near her home in Los Angeles. Cutting and pasting like a teenage zine-maker, Gabbiani works through her personal experience as if trying to make sense of it. And though her landscapes approach sinister themes, the papercuts have a delicate simplicity to them. Unlike the super-flat paper constructions of Thomas Demand, her collages are textural and complicated. Layers peel and curl, creating shadow and texture, and at the edges of the paper, touches of the artist’s hand, like light pencil borders and pinholes, are left visible. It’s easy to be seduced by the construction of these works. Encountered on a gray day in the U.K., the kaleidoscopic façade of L.A. feels a million miles away, just as our critical climate emergency does for far too many. It’s all too easy to ignore, and to carry on as usual.

To return to the seven totems requisite for L.A. identity, the vision of a burning palm tree has become an indicator of belonging or inclusion for Angelenos. And yet, many palm trees across the city are expected to die in the coming years, marking a dramatic shift in the city’s classic iconography.³ In Hot Panoramas, Gabbiani utilizes an idealized L.A. trope to point to urgent ecological implications. However, her painstaking process and aesthetically pleasing imagery belie the grimness of the catastrophe that is climate change, mirroring the way that many of us continue to hold climate emergency at arm’s length, ignoring an imminent threat in favor of pursuing beauty in the everyday.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 33.

Francesca Gabbiani, Mutation XLIII (2023). Ink, gouache, acrylic, and cut paper on paper, 35 x 40.25 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Cedric Bardawil. Photo: Daniel Browne.

Francesca Gabbiani, Mutation XLVII (2023). Ink, gouache, acrylic, and cut paper on paper, 17 x 21 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Cedric Bardawil. Photo: Daniel Browne.

Francesca Gabbiani, Hot Panoramas (installation view) (2023). Image courtesy of the artist and Cedric Bardawil. Photo: Daniel Browne.

Francesca Gabbiani, Apocalypse RN VI (2023). Ink, gouache, acrylic, and colored paper on paper, 15 x 11.75 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Cedric Bardawil. Photo: Daniel Browne.

Rosa Tyhurst lives and works in the U.K. and is a curator at Gasworks, London. She has previously held curatorial and research positions at Nottingham Contemporary, Spike Island, KADIST, and the de Young Museum. Her writing has been published in Art Monthly, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere.

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