2003-10-26

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The Sinister Beauty of Global Conspiracies

Mr. Hobbs first encountered Lombardi's work through a review in Art in America magazine in June 1999. Immediately, he was impressed by its sheer beauty, by the delicacy of the curving lines, delineating abstract force fields created by the global movement of money. He describes the works variously as webs, rhizomes and constellations. "It was a mental and visual seduction," he said. Mr. Hobbs was also intrigued that the drawings showed only a sliver of a larger, inaccessible reality. "The drawings exist," he said, "between what is known — the people, the organizations, the court judgments — and the unknown, which is what is between them. In that sense, they are about the difference between the ideal and the real."