" My land is Italy, " the Nobel-winning poet Salvatore Quasimodo wrote, " and I sing her people, and also the plaint covered by the rumble of her sea, the limpid mourning of her mothers, I sing her life. " For some 10 years now, the Vermont-based artist Malory Lake has been singing Italy — mostly Tuscany — in her pastels, and her work has been documented at two-year intervals by shows at the Pucker Gallery. The current offering finds her moving north, into Emilia Romagna and on to the Veneto — and, in a way that’s unique to this artist, taking us with her.

The first thing you notice about Lake’s pastels is probably the sfumato technique — everything is seen through a smoky haze. Perhaps this is a (Neo-Platonic?) statement about how fragile reality is. The Italian verb sfumare can mean Òto evaporateÓ; it’s as if God had lit a match and we were all going up in smoke. Lake’s light seems to have been inspired by the early-20th-century crepuscolari school of Italian poetry: it’s always dawn or dusk in her work, so that we’re forever in transition, but are we coming or going? And though most of her titles pinpoint specific locations, they’re such tiny hamlets that the titles wind up being generic; her work isn’t about geography, it’s about states of mind — ours as well as hers. You’ll notice, too, that the Italians themselves are absent. Do they live in a different world? As Giorgio Bassani points out in Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, we never get into the other person’s garden.

What’s new about ÒA Shared JourneyÓ is not the different landscapes — Lake’s Veneto looks pretty much like her Toscana — but the different perspectives. Some of these pastels are panoramic, roughly 10 by 25 inches. Sunset, Sensano, which graces the back page of the catalogue, is all broad field and secluded buildings; you wonder whether a 360-degree sweep wouldn’t just show more of the same. Other new works, at 28 by 12 inches, are decidedly vertical. Villa at Serre di Rapolano is lit by a salmon blaze — a William Blake color — that might be redemptive, but its source is obscured by the villa, which fills most of the frame, accompanied by the usual psychogogic cypresses.

Often we seem to be standing in just the wrong place to understand what we see. Villa at Isola Madre finds us looking at part of a house, part of a wall, part of a tree — it’s as if, camera-shy, they were all edging out of the frame. The ÒsubjectÓ appears to be the pale-green patch of ground in front of the villa, but we can’t see whether it’s grass or dirt or something else, and we don’t know where the light is coming from. Entrance to La Foce confronts us with a barrier, the low wall that perhaps frames the entrance, which we might see if we were able to turn right, but that’s out of the picture space. Instead, the tall corner of a building and the even taller cypresses that flank it blot out the sky. Many of Lake’s villa ÒportraitsÓ include a decorative newel post at the end of a wall or else an ornamental vase or flower pot; Villa Marcello at Levada even has what looks to be a human sculpture atop its entrance gate. But we’re never quite at the entrance — we want to explore the place, but we keep taking a wrong turn and getting lost. Some perspective would be welcome, but we don’t get it: we’re too close, or not close enough.

What’s comforting — or perhaps just the opposite — in these situations is that Lake shows signs of sharpening her focus and opening up her color palette. Sunset, Piana boasts an expanse of vertical sky, which itself is unusual for this artist (lots of sky in her horizontal compositions, but in the verticals it’s generally occluded); it’s bright orange yellow, and you can actually see the sun. And in Villa at Tremezzo, there’s a big pot full of what look to be red geraniums — at any rate they’re bright red — sitting on a stone wall with scroll work whose sharp lines invite our scrutiny. Quasimodo also wrote that Òlife is not a dream.Ó Where will Mallory Lake take us next?