What can be said for short-hand emotion? For preparatory hijinks? For universal experience in otherworldly environs? Frankly, a lot. Then: consider Madrid-based artist Lorena Prain and her beautifully strange doings. At her recent solo exhibition at Plate Gallery in Paris, bleeding, perhaps begging to be Biblical fruit suspends in surreal languor, ghoulish dogs with candles mounted on their backs signal pending attack, otherwordly and bepimpled youths are rendered sheepishly vulnerable in free-form acrylic. Classic sentiments are boiled down and instantaneous, despite the craft or time that might have been spent to get here. Such is the preparatory condition of preparing this issue, volume one of our 20th anniversary, and such was the visionary dalliance displayed by none other than Karl Lagerfeld in 1965 when the five Fendi sisters asked him to create a logo for a small modern collection of furs. In “five seconds,” as he recalls, he sketched out the iconic “double flipped” F’s as an artful abbreviation of the words “Fun Furs.” An instant classic was born. Since then, the logo has been reinterpreted in countless variations, while always symbolizing the quirk and elegance of the Fendi ethos. With the rampant revival of 1980s logomania, the double flipped F’s are back in the spotlight, and revelers of brash-meets-cool complication, à la Ms. Prain, offer up what we’ve always known: things that start with ‘F’ (fast, fire, fury, par exemple) and a number of others which need not earn mention here, are better in multiples.
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Photographed by Fe Pinheiro
Styled by Ivonna Yvon
Model: Lorena Infantes Prain
Hair: Rimi Ura
Makeup: Masae Ito
Photographed at: Gallery M14
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