MOSTRA AOCF58

**Location AOCF58 - Galleria BRUNO LISI, via Flaminia 58 - Rome (metro A, Flaminio stop)**

**Artist:** Ron Laboray

**Title:** Pretty Power

**Curated by:** Camilla Boemio

**Graphic design:** Silvia Piazza

**Thanks to Vola Volé Bee, Orsogna Winery**

**Opening Monday, December 2nd from 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM**

During the opening, there will be a conversation between the artist and the curator.

**Period from December 3rd to December 20th, 2024**

**Hours Tuesday to Friday from 5:00 PM to 7:30 PM**

Pretty Power, an exhibition of new works by Ron Laboray focused on the concepts of beauty and power, includes unique large-scale drawings and a series of animated musical videos, inaugurating a new direction in the artist's practice.

Laboray has focused on what unites us. The Pretty Power series includes three large-scale layered drawings that explore the complex relationship between power and beauty. Historical events, cultural icons, natural wonders, and traditional symbols that evoke these dual conditions are juxtaposed and depicted with realistic images and abstract color fields.

Among these elements, the audience will discover Shirley Muldowney's victory as the first American female drag racing champion, the national flowers of the G12 countries, a diagram used to cut gemstones, and cultural artifacts associated with musical icons like Kurt Cobain and Syd Barrett.

A transparent plastic sheet serves as a canvas, allowing the surface to be touched on both sides, with a black permanent marker on one side and paint applied on the other, with the plastic and permanent materials acting as a metaphor for the elements of popular culture on display. The transparent quality is essential for the drawing's existence as a timeline since the most recent information is placed at the top of the composition and older information in the background, although the orientation is sometimes inverted. The result is a visual timeline that evokes reflection and a sense of celebration. Like stars in the night sky, the subject within each composition is separated by time and distance; but, as a drawing, it is compressed into a constellation.

The exhibition also includes a series of animated music videos created simultaneously with Pretty Power, works that complement the pop cultural musical references found in the drawings.

The music videos were produced by the creative collective Little Richard's Almanac, an effort the artist launched in 2023 with his partner Niki Elliott. To date, LRA has collaborated with well-known musical artists to create videos for: The Brian Jonestown Massacre (Berlin), Federale (Portland), L.A. Mood (Australia), and composer Engelbert 'Angel' Lerch (Monaco).

According to Boemio: "This exhibition revisits the means, modes of thinking, and practices of Laboray that have been present throughout his long career, while simultaneously marking a series of important and far-reaching new experiments. Laboray examines the wider cultural landscape and mass culture as though he is using a psychological X-ray, producing highly visual works, many inspired by painting, music, and the American entertainment and show business world; encapsulating in this selection a lexicon of iconic images, where myths, common emotions, and enigmas of different periods of the twentieth century associate. The themes addressed include female power, social revenge, the primal frontier instinct which are linked to objects that have entered the collective memory, weaving aesthetic references to popular culture. In addition to these themes, the artist has fully integrated his personal experience and life story into this exhibition, his gaze providing us with keys to understanding America of the '60s/'70s and '90s, echoing the hopes and disappointments of each of us, unsuspecting viewers and fans involved in a carefree yet deadly game. A journey of determination in which rock stars Syd Barrett and Kurt Cobain, grunge, the years of youth rebellion, associate with the figure of the first female automotive pilot: Shirley Muldowney known as 'Cha Cha'. Muldowney broke gender barriers by resisting discrimination and a near-fatal accident at two hundred fifty miles per hour that shattered her bones.

She is an undisputed pioneer of risk-taking, using her talent to uproot preconceptions by challenging death and herself, in a media 'waltz'. The images used allude to a kaleidoscopic aesthetic intersection between power, temporal division, and language, through the tight inclusion of references and latent contents that weave a refined narrative, in which deep and poetic, personal and universal reflections are mirrored."