Goldschmied & Chiari - Artificial Landscapes

Conversation between the artists and the curator Gaspare Luigi Marcone

You began work on the Untitled Views in 2014. Could you tell us something about the genesis of these works?

?The Untitled Views were born in 2014 during research for and production of our solo show La démocratie est illusion for the Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle in Brest and for the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Villa Croce in Genoa. On this occasion we exhibited the first Medusa Mirrors, inspired by the special effects created by the director and illusionist Georges Méliès, who used coloured smoke to make objects and people appear and disappear in his films. The first images were created in our studio in Rome, in Eleonora’s apartment where we used cigarette smoke and a smoke machine to create the first photos to be printed on mirrors. When Sara moved to Milan and the collector Mariano Pichler offered us the former garage in the Lambrate area as a studio everything changed. It was that setting that we experiment with coloured flares like those used in stadiums. The first experiments were pink and black monochromes that we exhibited in New York in Kristen Lorello’s gallery in 2014. In 2015 we made the first works we actually called Untitled Views; these were monochrome blue and orange mirrors that conceptually reproduced artificial diurnal and nocturnal, recreated in the studio. A number of these works are brought together in our monograph La démocratie est illusion (Cura.Books, Rome, 2016). The Untitled Views are contemporary views in which the spectators are reflected, projecting themselves and the place in which the work is installed into a continuous dialogue with the space, the time and the identity of those that inhabit them.

?

Smoke, illusions and magic have characterised many of your works… Smoke and mirrors are moreover frequently associated with magical or religious rituals…

?As we mentioned, this latest cycle of work investigates the similarity between the practice of deception and illusion in the representation of reality through theatrical magic and the policies of the secret services. ?Through illusion, the speed and ability of the magician concentrates the spectator’s attention on certain elements and conceals others. Making the trickery realistic deceives the spectator and blinds them in front of the stage, restoring a sensation of infantile wonder and incredulity. The relationship between magic and the practices of the secret services lies in the fact that the public somehow wants to be hetero-directed, that it does not want to discover the trick. The question rests on the “difference between believing and seeing, between believing to see and glimpsing or less” (Jacques Derrida).?The same aspect of believing is found in magical and religious rituals. The mirror is an archetypal feminine device that recalls the relationship with otherness and with the reflection of the self, while the use of smoke undoubtedly suggests a symbolic imaginary bound up with the witch, the shaman and the priestess.

?

You’ve frequently created a comparison with the great artists of the past such as Monet with the Ninfee and Turner with the Untitled Views… as well as with certain historical-political events…

?We feel a strong connection between these works and the Ninfee cycle, photographs made between 2003 and 2011 in which the polluted Tiber is studded with flowers made from coloured plastic bags “re-representing” Monet’s water lilies exhibited at the Orangerie. With the Ninfee nature becomes a set en plein air, while for the Untitled Views our studio is the place in which nature is reproduced artificially with the aid of colourful toxic smokes. With both cycles the history of art and the landscape become citations and images to be “re-represented” artificially. There is a dialogue with painting through the means of photography: it’s almost a challenge, perhaps also a little playful, to the medium itself and the sacred idea of the history of art and the “masters” of the past. We believe that the connecting link between these different practices in our work is the need to push through the limits of the concept of “nature” and of “history”, questioning the cultural and social construct of the idea of landscape.

?

In the most recent works a further reflection emerges that concerns nature both on a conceptual and it might be said chromatic level, with some works being predominantly green and other evoking eclipses, sunsets, the aurora borealis… Moreover, you have quoted Derrida and his thinking on believing, seeing and glimpsing; the metaphor of sight and knowledge seems to be important…

?The Untitled Views reproduce a natural environment artificially, an aerial landscape inside a studio thanks to a palette of colourful and toxic flares. There is an aesthetic of destruction underlying the research leading to the Untitled Views such as the urban protests, war zones, industrial pollution and the wildfires that transform into delicate landscapes, blazing sunsets, artificial Aurora Borealis, nocturnal moons that emerge from blue clouds. Moreover, the initials of Untitled Views evoke UV rays, of which the sun is one of the principal sources, and it is well known how it can be difficult or at times dangerous to look at the sun or an eclipse with the naked eye.

For the Project Room of the Galleria Poggiali in Pietrasanta we have installed a “new trilogy” with circular works (all from 2019) evoking the natural phenomena mentioned earlier, with chromatic passages from blue to red that also become alchemical transformations of nature and matter. They are like three great pupils looking at one another and looking at us.

In other works there is a prevalence of landscapes in tones of green that reference images of tropical forests, of jungles, a wild, alienating and exotic nature that recalls our trips to Brazil and Mexico. These new landscapes are previously unseen and are part of a new “branch” of the Untitled Views.

?

So, recapping, what are the Untitled Views and how do they fit in with your earlier work?

?The Untitled Views are mirrors of large and medium format on which are fixed photographs by means of an innovative and secret technique that succeeds in integrating totally the image with the reflecting surface realised by a French firm after years of experimentation. The photos show combinations of coloured flares ignited in the studio. Once ignited, the flares produce different combinations of colours and clouds that we photograph within a few minutes before they disappear.

Without doubt the Untitled Views are closely related to the Ninfee in their natural reflection on nature and the landscape but also for the transformative aspect that characterises them: in the alchemical attempt to transform a base material into art. The unique characteristic of these works is their abstraction and the meditative and contemplative aspect not found in any of our other works. Citing more or less by memory a a phrase of yours, “Over time, the Untitled Views have redeemed themselves from a precise or unequivocal reference, they are works that live on polysemy. ?There are numerous references or allusions that remained ‘suspended’ and which the spectator may ‘signify’ on the basis of their own sensibility, culture or imaginary”.

?

What kind of imaginary do you link the Untitled Views to?

?The compositions are inspired by the dramatic skies of the works by artists associated with the tradition of the view painters, in particular the later period of the painter William Turner when his skies became almost abstract. Just when we working on the creation of the Untitled Views we visited the exhibition Late Turner: Painting Set Free at Tate Britain in London (2014-2015). We were interested in combining the painterly references with the usual imaginary in which we are accustomed to seeing the use of smoke and flare such as urban protests, signals of danger, war zones and industrial areas. In practical terms we frequently worked by examining the painterly imaginary and attempting to deconstruct the ideal naturalness of the landscape through the use of photography.

?

Let’s talk about the performative processes through which you arrived at Untitled Views: what did this involve and to what degree did they influence the finished work? Moreover, the ideas of the double, of the ambiguous, of the relationship seem to inform the works, in part because you are an artistic couple or rather “duo”…

?The work is a performative act of an alchemical nature: from the realisation in the studio to the display in the gallery.?The very moment of the ignition in the studio is a performance, which takes place behind closed doors, to which we are the only witnesses but which is capture via the medium of photography. At the moment in which the flares are ignited with different combinations of substances and colours, the cloud expands in the room in coloured and unpredictable spirals that compose aerial artificial landscapes that last just a few minutes and change continuously. The photography is a very rapid process with a high dose of uncertainty with regard to the result.

The performative aspect does not end with the creation of the work but continues in the exhibition space; we always install the works personally paying attention to the nature of the space that is reflected in the works so that the spectators becomes part of a relational experience, immersing themselves in the work. Thanks to their reflective material, the Untitled Views change during the day, reacting to the environment in which they are set, responding to changes in the light and the movements of the individual observers, making time, space and the observers protagonists of the work.