LUISA CATUCCI GALLERY: “CÈCI N’EST PAS UNE PHOTO” SHOWS HOW ATYPICAL USES OF PHOTOGRAPHY CAN TURN FORM INTO ABSTRACTION AND VICEVERSA
Text by: Fiammetta Cesana
“The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.” – Johannes Kepler
The Belgian artist Mathilde Nardone and the Finnish artist Antti Pussinen are now on show at Luisa Catucci Art Gallery in Berlin with the exhibition “Cèci N’Est Pas Une Photo”, presenting two different unusual photographic printings and overturning of significance.
They may look like classic photographs, instead Mathilde’s nature morte are directly printed with the scanner. Her images embrace plants and flowers accurately selected to tell something about her family’s background and about the universal complex of human relations. This particular still life creation so is able to bring the static of nature to the dynamism of people’s stories and feelings. Mathilde’s works make the portrait of something tangible, organic the embodiment of the untouchable work of our minds which is entitled to produce thoughts and memories out of the the world of nature we are inhabiting.
Alongside, Antti presents his particular employment of the ancient technique of photogram to capture the Lissajous curves, used in physics to study waves and their intensity. The restless movement of the waves is trapped in his personal photographic depiction, by enhancing the static and design-wise potentials of the Lissajous curves. Opposed to Mathilde, the Finnish artist, instead of bringing to life the abstraction of human stories from plants’ physical presence, expresses the possibilities of solid applications of unseeable entities.
The artists’ two very distinct modes of composition, thanks to their complementary meaning transformations, find ways to talk to each other in a harmonious merge – and reversal – of oppositions. On one side the real becomes the imaginary, on the other the immaterial becomes the object… the theory becomes the design, the nature becomes the story, the perception becomes the construction… Within the show forms and ideas are in constant dialogue and overlap, just like in everything we experience everyday as equilibrists between the visible and the invisible world – from the creative intuitions we have by observing a person, a garment, a plant, or an apparently useless object, to our own material productions, such as a text like this, a photograph, a sculture, which are built through the ability of freezing the incessant flow of life’s invisible essence.
“Cèci N’Est Pas Une Photo”
Luisa Catucci Art Gallery
Berlin
From March 6 to May 4
