Wave Print - Limited Edition of 1

La Placa's paintings and prints are the intersection of a number of diverse interests and disciplines that range from the science of moiré patterns; the notion of the sublime in 19th American landscape painting; the Italian Futurist concepts of 'Dynamism' and 'Simultaneity' (on a multi-dimensional level); and the visual explosion resulting from 'liberation of letter structure' as posited by artists emerging from the Graffiti movement in the early 1980's such as Rammellzee. La Placa's interest in the science of moiré patterns started when he saw the use of interference phenomena to reveal sub-atomic structures in his scientist father's crystallographic x-ray diffraction experiments at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the late 1960's. One microscopic crystal - in this case the experimental superconducting metals his father was creating - was placed on top of another to 'magnify' the physical structure beyond the resolution of the electron microscope. When two sets of equally spaced parallel lines are overlaid and one is turned at less than 30 degrees, they produce a third perpendicular pattern or what is called 'reciprocal amplification' in mathematics. This third pattern is actually a 'magnification' of the two from which it emerges. Although La Placa's work owes a substantial debt to Op Art, his methods and intentions are quite distinct from the strict flatness of painters like Bridget Riley. He does not see geometry as cold or repressive. In contrast, his paintings use a much wider variety of expanding pattern, depth and colour to break up the picture plane. There is never a privileged focal point. This dynamic proliferation is more aligned with the Abstract Expressionists where the canvas acts as an arena that records the painters movements and gestures, resulting in a web of optical energy like in the work of Jackson Pollack. In La Placa's version, any slight deviation in the hand-spaced lines or in the angle of which they intersect, produces a deviation in the overall moiré pattern, a hyper sensitive way to record the his gestures. This print is based on the eponymous painting (72" x 108") completed by La Placa in 1988. The original, often mistaken for a computer generated image, was entirely painted by hand using a complex masking technique where the paint, consisting of rare pigments suspended in a Silica based polymer, is literally cast onto specially prepared canvas. 'Wave' was inspired by the dynamic symmetries of the waves off the coast of Montauk, Long Island, where La Placa lived as a child.