Exhibition Review: Looking Behind the Curtain

Review of Francisca Rivero-Lake and Carla Verea Hernández: “Paparazza Moderna: Lovers & Frenemies”

Lake Verea, the artistic and romantic duo of Francisca Rivero-Lake and Carla Verea, maintains a guerilla photographic practice. Fascinated by the complex relationships behind canonical modern houses, they photograph reticent buildings without notifying current owners. As paparazza—the rare feminine conjugation of everyone’s love-to-hate-em media pests—they approach with a sort of impish glee. The resulting photographs are thus full of risk and spontaneity, offering a refreshing counterargument to the glossy, straightened images favored by architectural tastemakers.

While the products are visually muted, Lake Verea’s image-making process is nothing but vocal. Their cameras oscillate between distant exteriors and intimate close-ups, challenging the single-family house as the locus for heteronormative ideals. Those genuine stakes come fully into view when they speak. In Rudolph’s austere temple to modernity—and dressed in twinning all-black incognito paparazza outfits, the duo delivered a voyeuristic take on loving and losing in sexy, rectilinear rooms. Their quasi-comedic performativity was precisely the tonal upset that made the canon human-scaled and close to life. It almost feels unfulfilled to consume their work upstairs in the gallery without the live narration. Anecdotes of love and hate are betrayed by the absence of human figures in the photographs themselves.

If the exhibition maps friendships, rivalries, and client-architect feuds, the accompanying lecture-performance zeroes in on perhaps the strongest emotion of all: love. It’s a reminder that modernism did not arise outside fragile human conditions. Pulling back the curtain of tectonics, Lake Verea lets us witness the messy, funny, tragic people that make life and love in buildings, and sometimes for buildings.

Paparazza Moderna: Lovers & Frenemies is on view through November 29.