Famously, Los Angeles is populated by the ‘transplants’ who arrive hourly to make their mark on this town. Fittingly, they have chosen a place where a high percentage of the actual plants are transplants too. The city’s most ubiquitous arboreal denizens - from towering Canary Island Palms, leafy Australian Eucalyptus, purple-blooming South American Jacaranda and hundreds more, were all brought from elsewhere to take root  and thrive here. In fact, the megalopolis could be seen as a vast, international open-air botanical garden where the entrance fee is the price of a taxi from LAX. Without transplants of either kinds, canyons and city streets would be arid and bare, with skyline and eye-line unglamorously flat rather than drawn aspirationally skyward. 

And so the immersive installation of Agostino Iacurci’s ‘The Traveling Landscape’ lands on receptive territory. Drawing upon a rich heritage of botanical motifs and silhouettes, the Italian artist, based in Bologna after many years in Berlin, delivers a new body of work that navigates through cultural ecosystems from the ancient to the Post-Modern. His is a polyglot art that also speaks the languages of  architecture and design, calling back to the collective history of humanity ascribing totemic powers to natural forms and representing them in both sacred and domestic settings.  

For this, the artist’s first solo show in North America, he chose Los Angeles - or did Los Angeles choose him? “I’ve been using palm trees as a subject for my paintings for a long time, but never thinking of the location. I’ve always been approaching them as a more symbolic’ object. I first came to L.A. several years ago and of course I became super fascinated by the landscape. So when the opportunity to do this project came up, I thought it was the perfect place to show palm trees.” 

Varieties of palmate fronds form a unifying central motif not only here but throughout the  artist’s entire practice. Iacurci explains: “There are several reasons why I am interested in the palm tree. The first is personal, in that they are very common in my hometown,  Foggia. Most of it was torn down by bombing in the Second World War, but there were palm trees that survived the bombing, and they were an important part of my childhood. The second is that palms are a tree that have been traveling and colonizing the entire  world, across borders and even across time.” As a literal example of this, Iacurci cites the  ‘Methuselah,’ a Judean date palm which was miraculously regrown from a 2000-year-old seed found during excavations at Masada in the 1960s. “So to me, the palm tree is a time  raveler, a space traveler, and also traveling through my memory.”

Iacurci has put his plant-centric themes into action all over the globe, with shows and  urban interventions from Mexico City to Naples, Prague to New Delhi. He is also beloved  of HERMÉS, the venerable French Maison inviting Iacurci to create several of his signature immersive tableaux, including the fully functional one-night-only ‘Hotel il Faubourg’ theatre in Milan in 2021.

Inside the sandstone cube of the Pacific Design Centre’s Gallery, Iacurci employs a strong  block palette that sets coral, cinnabar, violet, viridian, terracotta and tangerine side by side  with soft charcoal black, with bold large-scale panels of vinylic emulsion on linen and  individual works on paper staged against trompe l’oeil and harlequin-diamond painted  walls. Geometric and symmetric, the works are layered with resonant symbols, evoking the ancient friezes of all cultures that were brightly painted before subsequent millennia  weathered off their original color schemes, leaving today’s museums to exhibit sadly bleached relics of wan off-white marble. Pop-historic, Futurist-archaic, they reference  Memphis-the-Modern-Design-movement as well as Memphis, the capital of Kemet, the murals of Pompeii as well as mid-century poster art graphics. ‘Eyes’ dangle from fecund  lianas framed by Classical columns and balusters, and the layering of Romanesque  arched doorway portals gives the effect of stepping through into the hot sun of a mythic pan-Mediterranean past, without moving at all. 

This effect is deliberate, as Iacurci explains: “The ‘cyclorama’ was a style of panorama  painting popular in Europe before jet-setting travel was easily accessible to most people.”  The artist is struck by the concept. “You would visit Vienna or Frankfurt and see the  panorama of say, Paris. You are not going to Paris, Paris is coming to you. They were  these big circular paintings that would travel all over the world so you could experience  these different cities from a spectator’s vantage point. It was also in itself a building, kind of  like a circular movie theatre.” Shedding some light on the exhibition’s evocative title, he continues, “You entered a closed place, but it takes you somewhere else. So in my imagination, this L.A. show was a kind of panorama, like a square cyclorama. You enter this building, and the paintings, all taken together, they make a landscape.” 

And they do. Iacurci’s abstract gardening excavates a pervasive out-of-time feeling that  continues even as you step outside the gallery, with his aesthetic messages reinforced by  the controversial yet impossible-to-ignore structures of the Pacific Design Center itself. Architect César Pelli’s Cubistic-anthropomorphic ‘blue whale,’ ‘red ship' and ‘green crab’ as  well as the many iconic Phoenix canariensis palms integrated into the design footprint assist in extending the artist’s play of motifs and shapes to the entire cityscape. Whether  you’re a starry-eyed transplant or a born-and-raised native Angeleno, you’ll emerge from the PDC cube’s mystery journey through nature and culture to view your very familiar city with new, ancient eyes. 

On view until January 12th 2024, ℅ Robert Grunenberg Gallery Berlin  www.robertgrunenberg.com.