Urban Landscape, Los Angeles 1991

Curator: Right, let’s dive into Franco Fontana’s "Urban Landscape, Los Angeles," shot back in 1991. What grabs you first about it? Editor: The playful, almost childlike quality! The way these blocks of color stack and jostle – it feels like someone’s playing Tetris with buildings. It’s incredibly vibrant, almost aggressively so. Curator: Fontana had a real knack for finding these accidental compositions in cityscapes. It's tempting to frame him alongside the Pop Art movement for sure. But you know, at its heart, this work is actually deeply rooted in formal concerns, lines, planes and colour theory...all about abstraction using only shape and shadow to render a place Editor: Absolutely, that tension is what makes it so engaging. You’ve got the recognizable – vaguely architectural shapes suggesting an urban setting, but he flattens them. Removes detail to reduce them into pure, unadulterated color. That stark turquoise sky. No blending and no graduating colours... it is a place reduced to basic elements and colour. Curator: Fontana walked a fascinating line, actually, somewhere between documentarian and abstract painter. Look at how the different surfaces texture interact -- and then notice that ladder in the upper center! It’s like a tiny disruption – a gentle poke at the hyper-perfect geometry of the image, and suddenly that patch of unblemished teal becomes infinite Editor: Good point! Those disruptions are tiny victories. I am immediately aware of its flatness, but my gaze lingers, because in its geometric simplicity, there’s an undeniable emotional jolt. Curator: It is something really visceral about how that color palette clashes and resonates... that almost overwhelming intensity… and that sense of an architectural photo with any sense of actual human scale removed is so arresting Editor: Yeah, the lack of human scale is disorienting. Still, I can look at this and conjure a bustling Los Angeles! A testament to Fontana’s eye I reckon that I am free to imbue it with my own narrative as much as appreciate it for pure, pictorial and painterly beauty. Curator: Precisely. This work epitomizes that push and pull, and that’s why it sticks with us.