Louisa Gagliardi draws freely from the codes of painting as well as on contemporary graphic design and advertising in order to rethink questions of figure and ground, flatness and depth, dimensionality and translucence, the enigmatic and the banal, digital imagery and painterly marks.
Her paintings exist as reflections: internally, of artist and viewer, and of the rapid acceleration of technology in our visualized and socialized worlds. Their liminal status, as both digitally rendered images and physically present objects, speaks as much to contemporary concerns of self-mediated personas as they do to the compositions and narratives of the classics of art history. At its heart, Gagliardi's oeuvre plays with expectations, fulfilling and subverting them simultaneously. Viewers of the work find that ideas of authenticity and authorship are invoked and rebuffed; the smooth digital surfaces of the paintings blossom into echoes and refractions of their hand-worked exterior as they are approached and circled. Brushstrokes exist both physically and are printed. The clear gel medium creates texture and melodrama, forcing the signature marks that the artist executed with a mouse on a screen in order to confront issues of reality in painting.
The book features an essay by Swiss Institute's Executive Chair and curator Simon Castets, as well as a conversation with Louisa Gagliardi by fellow artist Mitchell Anderson.