L'Arco Oscuro

The bustling, light-flecked and rain-slicked streets of Rome are the contemporary equivalents of traditional landscapes for Italian artist Maurizio Yorck, who renders discrete vistas of urban chaos in superb tones and textures. His acrylic compositions, representing varying times of day with differing degrees of stylization, manage to infuse familiar situations with drama and formal complexity. He captures the intense speed of the city streets while also freezing the action that characterizes them into quiet and elegant images. "Streets are the frame," he explains. "Lights, color and people become the main actors in my dreamlike vision of the city."

Foremost among the many evocative formal qualities that are striking in Yorck's work is an almost uncanny ability to conjure surfaces and temperatures. From the gleaming, bright paints of cars idling in midday traffic to the intense brake lights of cars slowing down on a cool night, each image bridges extremes of shadow and intense brilliance. Through such sharp contrasts Yorck infuses the seemingly mundane with tension and verve.