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Costanza Gastaldi: EROSIVA

18 October 2024 - 16 November 2024

Free

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Novalis Art Design is pleased to present EROSIVA, Costanza Gastaldi’s solo showing her newest series of photographs exploring female intimacy and illness. The artist will be present at the opening reception.

The exhibition presents for the first time a comparison between the widely exhibited and internationally acclaimed Loto Nero, and her newest series Erosiva. The technique used in both series is the extremely rare and fascinating héliogravure au grain, an ancient printing process dating back to the 19th century that allows a photographic image to be etched in low relief through various chemical processes on a copperplate. This very fine-grained technique can capture both the subtle nuances of grays and the depths of blacks from the original plate. This gives the prints a precious tactile quality, prolonging and amplifying the creative gesture through its manual nature and making it almost permanent over time.

The 80 large-format black-and-white landscape shots of Loto Nero were conceived during the artist’s journey to Huangshan in eastern China. This solitary journey along steep staircases, marked by ascesis and challenge, was the beginning of a simultaneous detachment and rapprochement for the artist. It introduces a distancing from the world and its precariousness, and a new and powerful form of spirituality that would later find its culmination and fulfillment in EROSIVA.

Loto Nero represents pure wandering, in the dual sense of both physicalroaming and the agonizing uncertainty of the mind or spirit. It is an emotionaland sentimental journey through physical obstacles, that faintly echo thepsychological ones awaiting the protagonist, an emblem of constant soulsearching, and an invitation to believe in imminent rebirth.

EROSIVA, on the other hand, is an ode to what is left inside us when everything collapses. It is an invitation to ponder on a topic that, in our view, has not yet been thoroughly addressed: the elusive relationship between female intimacy and illness. EROSIVA is from the contraction of two Italian words, eros and corrosiva (corrosive). It is a series of 17 photographs that captures the bitter dissonance between how a woman perceives herself during thevarious stages of healing— fully erotic, vibrant, and alive —and how others see her, as someone irreversibly marked by misfortune, devoid of desire, and separated from the rest of the world.

Curated by Angelica Moschin.

Details

Start:
18 October 2024
End:
16 November 2024
Admission:
Free
Event Category:

Organiser

Novalis Contemporary Art Design Gallery
Phone
28348568
Email
info@novalisartdesign.com

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