| The Growing Garden |
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Giuliana Cunéaz presents her new project in a solo show entitled The Growing Garden, presented by the Turin gallery Gagliardi Art System from March 7 to April 19, 2008. The exhibition features a series of as yet unseen works based on the relationship between art, science, nature, and new technologies. The exhibition, which is planned to occupy both floors of the gallery, centers around painted screens and a large video-installation entitled Birth Tree. Further, a group of works on paper is presented, where painting interacts with the reproduced 3D image.
Following the research track she had already gone down in 1983, with In Corporea Mente, the artist asks herself questions about the transformation of forms, and the way they chase one another from microcosm to macrocosm. Through the study of nanotechnologies, Cunéaz gets in touch with a series of images obtained with the help of the most powerful optical microscopes available. They evoke ambiguous landscapes, estranging places that recall reality in its fragmentation. The branch-like structure of a mineral, for example, is similar, in form and aggregation process, to the peripheral region of a neuron, or to the atomic structure of certain polymers. Therefore, starting from scientific images used as visionary sea beds, the artist creates 3D video animations, and then derives photos and canvas prints from them. Upon these, as well as upon the videos themselves, she then acts at several levels of elaboration, by painting - directly on the screen or canvas - a series of creatures inspired by the animal or vegetable world, and multiplies their image as if in a Zen ritual. The paradox lies in the fact that the painted image carries a conceptual uniqueness, as opposed to the cellular universe. If, on the one hand, cells build copies of themselves through self-replication (the powerful promise of nanotechnology), thereby abolishing diversity, the artist’s aim here was to follow the opposite procedure – through that which is apparently identical, she tried to revive and emphasize the differences, highlighting the esthetic potential of an unconventional vision. As Giovanni Iovane writes about the work: 'once the screen has lit up, painting is not immediately distinguishable from the projected images. These two kinds of superimposed images produce a sort of alternating rhythm, a short temporal shift, a virtuous form of dystonia.'
Gagliardi Art System / gallery, Torino |
