Portico Series: Basques

Portico Series consists of mixed media works on black paper, which emphasize intricately drawn lines and brush strokes from handmade, clay-based paint.  These images, which have a lace-like, mandala quality, are patterns generated by the repetition of a single design element from a carved wooden doorway in Rome.  Agati builds the work slowly mark-by-mark, form-by-form, following an adaptable set of rules.  The arrangement of shape and pattern has become for the artist, a loose mathematical method for exploring a multitude of visual possibilities.

Portico Series has been described as “mixed-media drawings whose intricate patterns suggest lacework…yielding a reflective quality.  Complex and shimmering, such exquisite compositions as Basques…evoke flowers, jewelry and orderly galaxies in the dark of space.”
                      Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post, February 2014