Lucia Laguna at Galerie Lelong: A First US Solo Painted by More Than One Hand

♦ ♦ ♦ MAY 21, 2026 | 3 MIN READ Lucia Laguna at Galerie Lelong: A First US Solo Painted by More Than One Hand At a Glance Lucia Laguna's first US solo at Galerie Lelong is worth crossing town for, an 84-year-old Rio painter whose layered landscapes are built, by design, by more than one hand. Stand in front of Paisagem nº 178 at Galerie Lelong on West 26th Street and the surface will not settle. A block of flat colour holds one corner. Over it, trees push up, then a bird, then a window frame, then a smear of green that has not decided whether it is a leaf or a brushstroke. The painting is dated 2026 and measures 140 by 150 centimetres, and it is the kind of surface read in passes, not all at once. This is “Apenas meus cabelos são brancos,” or “Only my hair is white,” the first solo exhibition in the United States for the Brazilian painter Lucia Laguna, on view through June 27. Laguna was born in 1941. She came to painting late, after a career teaching Portuguese, and studied at Parque Lage in Rio in the early 1990s. So the wall gets to say “first US solo” about a painter who is 84. That alone is worth the trip. It is not the most interesting thing in the room. Why a Lucia Laguna painting is built by more than one hand Here is what a critic reviewing the painting s might walk past, and what a painter cannot. Laguna does not start her own canvases. Her studio assistants do. The Lelong text describes the work accruing in layers, where “each successive layer of paint adds dynamic organic forms, often trees and flowers, but sometimes birds and human forms.” What the gallery text keeps quiet is whose hands lay the early ones. Laguna has been open about it for years: her assistants paint the first pass, working from photographs and references she chooses, and she then answers their marks with her own. She calls it a conversation. So the bottom of a Laguna painting is, by design, somebody else’s painting. What you are looking at on that wall is a duet billed as a solo. The bottom of a Laguna painting is, by design, somebody else’s painting. That is not a gotcha. It is the subject of the work. Laguna paints the layered city, the Zona Norte of Rio where train track, favela and hillside vegetation pile into a single view from a window. A surface built by several hands, each answering the last, is the honest form for that subject. The method and the picture are one idea. What hanging the small formats beside the landscapes reveals The show sets two ongoing series side by side: the Paisagem [Landscape] canvases and the Pequenos formatos [Small formats], the small ones worked in broad, textured brushstrokes. Hanging them together is the smartest decision in the room. On the large landscapes the layering reads as depth, almost as built space. On the small formats, at 70 by 90 centimetres, the same process reads as touch; the individual decisions show, the answer and the answer back, because the surface sits close to the eye. The room lets a visitor watch one me