Flowers, which often symbolise peace, become victims of brutal terror, revealing an uneasy beauty in destruction. This tension that exists between violence and beauty, destruction and creation is enhanced by the fruitful collision of the age-old need to capture ‘reality’ and the potential of photography to question what that actually means. The authority of photography in relation to objective truth has been shattered, but new possibilities to experience reality in a more complex and challenging manner have arisen.

If previous works revolved around the young, male, body’s potential for perfection, in which depersonalized sculptures stood as a symbol of the universal quest for idealism, the new works evolve within a more personal realm. Christian-Pontus Andersson burrows deeper into his own skin, by giving the sculptures a specific personal characteristic by donning the skin of a beloved person, the sculptures cease to be merely symbols of the human and the roles we play, and instead – through the truly personal –  capture something deeply universal.

“Cities are devastated and give way to forests and mountains. A string quartet and you and me in the grass, harmony and unison. This is where we go when we are tired and no longer seem to be good enough”.

Farewell Eden acts as a personal extension of the myth of the Garden of Eden and the notion of eternal life, where the artwork attempts to address man’s inescapable transience. It is a peaceful world that we gain access to, a perfect and fabulous place where trusting animals embrace or carry the sculptures like good samaritans. It is an animated world, a paradise where verdure shine of magic and grief becomes a dazzling white plumage, with this magnificence the grief becomes easier to bare. At the same time – as so often in Christian-Pontus Andersson’s work- perfection becomes fractured, exposing something deeply paradoxical. On the one hand this parallel reality aims to serve as a peaceful secure place, beyond the polemics between perfectionistic ideals and inevitable physical decay, on the other hand, it is a desire for pure perfection, and as such can only exist through a continual rigorous working regime.
“In Eden, we are as one. Together we are building and working hard to ensure our paradise is as beautiful, perfect and magnificent as possible. We build walls that block out the real”.

The longer we stay secure, the clearer the distance to the reality and the clearer it seems that an unpleasant alternative reality is taking shape around us. We are reminded that everything we encounter is a fictitious alias – the sculptures are doll-like, the animals are lifeless fragments of lives that are no longer; the cold harsh surface of the metal instruments is in stark contrast and makes itself felt. Suddenly the weight being carried on the shoulders is embraced. Suddenly safety appears as an illusion. Suddenly, we see what it really is.

A beautiful realm of death.

Sara Skoglund

As a child I was always making things, constructing and deconstructing the world around me. For me it was a way to understand the world and make it my own. Occasionally we’d make family trips up to London, where a favourite place to visit was the British Museum. I remember in particular seeing the relics from Tutankhamen’s tomb and the Japan Exhibition, which was like nothing I’d ever seen before. These shows seemed to light something inside me, firing my fascination with art and objects. Later, when I moved to Paris aged 16 to work as an au pair, the city’s galleries were where I spent much of my spare time and learnt how to ‘look’.

In a way my work is a sort of process without end – a ceaseless cycle of collection and creation. While the making can take anything from a couple of weeks to a few months the collection of the materials can take years. I create the basic form on paper first – I’ll often sketch an idea with no immediate plan as to how to use it. Working in this way allows me free rein of shape and scale, and to experiment in a way that is impossible when using actual materials. The feathering stage is much more like painting; it’s at once fluid and expressive, and requires meticulous attention to detail. It’s also highly meditative. So much so that I often become completely immersed in the act of making; I often look back at a finished piece of work and think, ‘Did I make that?’ As if the work takes on a life of its own.

The pigeon feathers come from a network of pigeon-racing enthusiasts I’ve been building up over the last five years. By necessity I’ve had to become fully conversant with the pigeon-racing world and I can’t tell you how supportive they’ve been. I once took a stand at one of the annual pigeon shows in the far North-East of England; people were asked to bring along bags of feathers and in return got their names put into a hat to win a work. It all felt a bit incongruous but I was made to feel very welcome – the racing fraternity seems to love the fact that I’m making something beautiful out of their precious birds’ moultings. The birds shed their feathers twice a year, in April and October, so there are just two brief windows of time in which to gather my materials.

The business of collecting the feathers and creating a work feels satisfyingly intertwined, and creates a kind of virtuous circle all of its own. Relying on the goodwill of a whole network of individuals gives a human dimension to the process, which is mirrored in the many hands required to complete the work. The crow, jackdaw and magpie feathers come from local gamekeepers; the farmers, whose crops they destroy, may consider them predators or pests, but the birds are appreciated – at least by me. That dichotomy between the birds’ reputations – and the loathing they inspire – and their feathers’ physical beauty and value to me as an artist is a crucial component of the material’s fascination for me; that ability for it to be both one thing and another gives an extra layer of meaning to my work, making the feather a useful metaphor for the duplicity of nature, a theme that sits at the core of my work.

I feel very physically connected to my materials, perhaps because I spend so many hours cleaning and sorting them. I’ve realised down the years that the preparation time is as much a part of the creative process as the actual making. It’s while I’m handling the feathers that I’m able to reflect on the work(s) I’m about to make, giving me crucial thinking time before I commit anything to paper. The mind is a malleable canvas, while physical mistakes can be hard to undo.

The feathering stage is compelling, hypnotic; I can happily lose myself in it for hours. It’s also instinctual – you can’t plan how to lay the feathers out nor can you really teach someone. Each feather contributes to the overall patterning of a piece, and it’s this implicit sense of movement in the shifting colours and gentle curve of each filament that brings the work to life. This final stage draws on the rituals of craft, on the connection between hand and eye and the natural serendipity that happens when you become fully immersed in giving life to an idea. It’s my favourite part of the process. And because it makes me so in tune with a piece it makes the finished work hard to let go.

Kate MccGwire

What do trees cry out for?
Trees cry out against the tree genocide. Forests are like body hair, like feathers of a bird. The world needs protection. Deforestation and forest fires are crimes we commit against the Earth. One of my paintings is entitled “Plucked Earth”. Trees cries are the cries of Indians, of animals, of children and of Mother Earth. We are the “enfants terribles”, doing it all against ourselves…
With social changes and constant technological breakthroughs, nature does not seem to be the priority in many plans.

What should we change?
We are losing our bond with nature and in this disposable society we are paying a very high price. We are wasting many lives because of our interest in a quick payback. The damage is already tangible because the Earth’s resources are not inexhaustible. Waste is accumulating and mankind is turning into it. We have to rush before we meet the worst scenario! We must manage to resist a generalized sterilization. There is no fate. There is a collective responsibility. You have to think differently. Global financial powers will crush men for raw material. Our cities are inundated with nitrates and none-ecological products. As long as we continue in the wrong track, biodiversity cannot resist the poison and will disappear into sterile and barren lands.

How do you define your art today?
The engine of my artistic creation is my indignation. Oh Earth! Humanity is sabotaging your beauty! Even if Mother Earth gives back the violence it receives, we stupid children continue to plant terrible ugliness. I want to create a poetic and engaging art. I want to create a protest. The titles of my drawings and my paintings are like eco-logical images between my mind and my pictorial images. Thus, they are cracked-earth, earth-polluted earth-fire, earth, cyclone, earth-screaming, terrible and sons of “Terranobyl”. My art is a way to transcend my personal and collective frustrations. I present a protest that belongs to our collective responsibility.

What is the mission of contemporary art?
Art shall question. Art must be challenging and make resistance. Painting is a visual to-do message. It is a mental exercise. It was also the same for Leonardo da Vinci for example. A painting is not created just for viewing or just to be admired. It is constructed to see through and especially to make you think. I want my paintings to get into the eyes and settle into the brains. Inside brains I want to plant questions. I think it should be like this for everyone. Art must work as critic to all our judgments and injustices.

In this world of quick changes, how do we harmonize industry and nature?
We will have to find a way to make these adjustments. Otherwise we will destroy, rather than preserve and disappear like dinosaurs. By questioning this contrast, I created a panel where half of it has urban and industrial material as a city on fire. Earth never asks, it cries, cries, cries!

Is there any way out?
I do not know how we will finally start a sustainable development, or if. I just know that each one of us must demand a “healthy community” as proposed by French sociologist Edgar Morin.

The fast industrialization process tends to run down the natural process of human adaptation to a new environment. How do we mitigate this process using art?
Art is a scream transformed into creation. I create, scream, cry. Screaming out, I get out of crises… economic crises, financial, social, energy and eco-logical ones. Cries of humanity, humanity’s crisis: the crisis of civilization! How do we transcend the screams? How do we exorcise the crisis? Being an artist in times of crisis is to be the opposite of a conformist.

What changes in your creative process to face the realities of these contemporary times?
More than ever, the artist must be a social screamer. I am a human cry! I paint our giant crises in colours! I use canvas as screams in silence to release my own crises on it and to avoid keeping it all inside of me! My best way of crying out is by reversing these challenging situations into opportunities. This helps me to resolve my bad feelings. I take a breath in the world crisis in which we seemed plunged. I take the brush as an arrow and aim at the target! Daring! Do not shut up! Resist! Persist! Insist as water drops in hard rock! Mark it!

How do we use art to align harmoniously with the immediate demands of the earth?
Simply create without destroying.

How does technology benefit your art without hurting it?
An artist can use all the technology of his time. I like to design using the technique of pen and ink and by water-colouring minimum details I create what I call “Echo-enluminures.” In these compositions I integrate many natural elements to my paintings such as plumes of tropical dead birds recovered in the Amazon. I pick volcanic sands in Iceland, dried leaves from the fall in France. I collect all that I see in India, Vietnam and throughout the world. And I love to use semi-precious stones from Brazil. Sometimes I make high definition scans and mix it onto a single canvas of two meters high. Then, I continue this composition as an alchemist using paintings and collages that promote biodiversity. I also use strands of vine, bark from trees, embalmed piranhas, fossils, bones, coral… everything that nature gives me spontaneously. Nothing is a minimalist composition.
Rather than baroque, I would call my work almost rococo. I refuse to be always the same!

Interview with Sergio Bello by Ricardo Fernandes

Valerie Hegarty’s artwork often poses as artifacts of art history gone awry. Through the combination of real and fabricated components, Hegarty leaves the viewer to wonder at the veracity of the transformation. For the High Line, she will create and install a work that imagines a nineteenth century Hudson River School landscape painting that has been left outdoors, exposed to the elements. Hegarty’s painting is based on Jasper Francis Cropsey’s Autumn on the Hudson River of 1860, a bucolic landscape that shows none of the affects of the Industrial Revolution. Hegarty’s canvas is tattered and frayed, and the partially exposed stretcher bars appear to be morphing into tree branches, as if reverting back to their natural state.



Curator Lauren Ross notes, “Since the nineteenth century, the Hudson has been associated both with Arcadian beauty and industrial development, perceptions both simultaneous and contradictory. Today one can view fading remnants of the river as an active shipping port, as well as recent attempts to return it to a more ‘natural’ state through the development of park areas and pedestrian walking paths, including the High Line itself.” As Hegarty describes it, her piece will “appear as if nature has become the artist, altering the idealized image of the early American wilderness to be a more layered representation of the area and times today”.

Valerie Hegarty ‘s installations create dream- like transitional spaces that expand and fracture the austerity of an exhibition space while dismantling the constructs of image making. Landscaping, is a new installation in which an idyllic woodland scene, seemingly alive and growing, overcomes the gallery in a collision of exterior and interior views.

In previous projects, Hegarty has used a method she refers to as ‘”reverse archeology”, in which layers of painted paper are applied to the gallery walls and then slowly peeled away to give an impression of the disintegration of an architectural apparition from her past. Moving from the discreet gesture of layering onto the surface of the wall to reveal specific memories, Landscaping is the first time that Hegarty’s constructions appear to break through the wall, in an illusion solely constructed from paper and paint. On one level the viewer can become overwhelmed with an inquisitive desire to determine what is real and what is constructed and on another, revel in the make believe.

In the same way the Native American Indians assert that Man kills what he does not understand. For Canesi aggression consists of the human being’s limits in understanding what is far away from him and different, in his incapacity to go beyond himself.
The idea comes from research into painting on various surfaces: from multimedial with grafic tablet and optical pen, to organic supports: plants, leaves, bark; all rich in sap.

Special colours are used when necessary, composed of natural and non-toxic substances, such as resin and coconut extract. The action consists of painting on smooth and living surfaces with an act of force, here is the reference to aggression on a living being which suffers it.

A consideration ‘humanely’ defined, although almost hidden or rather which is not carried out following common violent stereotypes. ‘ I do not pierce or tear, or mistreat the plant, and I cetrainly do not cut the leaves, rather do I worry about representing aggression from a human point of view. An aggression against Nature, but also against myself, painting figures using micro brushes in minute detail on moving and irregular supports, taking care of the perfect symmetry of the composition. A meticulous and patient approach which I carry out with the necessary attention, a ‘sacrifice’ for both, united in a creative process’.

The subjects represented are similar to digital prints, harking back to Mediaeval and Cinquecentesche representations; for the most part heads of demons, small dragons, fluorescent insects in the vivid colours associated with poisonous species. An aesthetic choice which reinforces the idea of the parasite dangerous for both plant and Man.

‘…to paint on a living structure representing the moment of enduring aggression is like descriving an attempted murder, where the important role is that of the intention and the abuse. It is not bodypainting or a tattoo carried out by consenting beings. The artist actor comits the violence and the plant suffers it. Or at least suffers it according to human experience. I do not want to abuse Nature by appropriating it for myself, but rather to favour my awareness by sacrificing it’.

Nature for its part reacts to these actions by modifying its forms and in the end the painted leaf falls. The regenerative process takes over…The action of abuse, the unusual and fatuous act of painting that which need no embellishment as it is by its very nature ornamental, shows us how ephimerous is the result. Like a Mandala, when the plant decides to let the leaf go the work ceases to exist in that form. Man remains alone in his conviction his fixation on “forever young” where eternal youth is a value to be pursued, however the real necessity lies in accepting mutation.

Alessandro Turci

These words represent the best possible introduction to the work of Cadioli, they help us understand the urgency that punctuates the rhythms of his daily practice, which is constantly striving towards the conquest of a new perspective.
While enjoying the works on display it will be difficult to avoid the game of finding correspondences with great twentieth-century European abstract artists.

Someone will find ‘traces’ of a Klee or a Kandinsky, others will emphasize the similarities with the construction of a Moholy -Nagy, or even imagine a link to Luigi Veronesi’s stills. An addictive game to which the same Cadioli felt passionate in his formal research, the basic idea of abstract journeys was to embark on a trip around the earth, armed with a prodigious technological magnifying glass (Google Earth) and a specific purpose: to find motifs related to European abstract painting, among the forms that human beings give to the earth’s surface with their incessant activity.

Here he is, dwelling on landscapes that seem to come from a Bauhaus graphic workshop, and arriving – after a few mouse clicks – to compositions of natural and artificial elements that bring to mind the utopian models of El Lissitzky The Russian artist had argued that the short-sighted see “only the machine” in the works of constructivism, on the contrary such artistic experiences show us that it is impossible to establish a certain boundary between mathematics and art, or between a work of art and a technology found (El Lissitzky and Hans Arp, Die Kunstismen, 1925).

This consideration leads us beyond the mere aesthetic affinity between Cadioli’s most recent artistic production and abstractionism, offering us the opportunity to tighten the focus to its more significant contact point, that is the relationship between expression patterns and mathematical formulas.

What we perceive in the abstract journeys are shapes and colours but, beyond this surface, an invisible web of numerical sequences that represent the real architecture of the artworks – just as happened in Vantongerloo that materialized and gave shape to mathematical formulas in his creations.

The De Stijl Belgian artist is one of the first who has investigated the issues of mathematical relationship’s visual translation and the formalization of combinatorial processes; in Cadioli’s work the continuous transcoding visual-abstraction mathematics-visual is totally implicit, it is in fact nothing but the so-called principle of “numerical representation”.

As Manovich points out, this is the principle behind the present civilization of the computer and – in hindsight – the description of an image or a shape through a mathematical function, which is constantly happening behind the “phantasmagorie” that take life on billions of screens worldwide. According to the Russian origin theoretician “when new media come to life on computers, they come in numerical form, but it also happens that many new media are reconverted from old media” (The Language of New Media, 2001).

In Cadioli’s work it is not possible to draw a sharp line between the media objects that arise in numerical form, and those that are “reconverted” from analogical media. In the creative process that gives rise to the abstracts journeys we are witnessing a dizzying jump from one medium to another.

Let’s try to reconstruct these steps: some humans alter through their activities (here it is mostly industrial-scale agricultural activities) the natural landscape, shaping it to reminiscent pictorial motifs that are characteristic of the twentieth century European abstract art; pictures of these landscapes are captured from satellites orbiting around the earth; other human beings (immaterial workers, perhaps Google employees) transform the photographs in a texture that is a sort of skin to be applied on the ‘body’ of two- dimensional and three-dimensional models that represent our planet; the so obtained virtual models become navigable through Google Earth, the popular program that allows us to fly across the world as we were on a romantic balloon; here Cadioli begins his own trips and formal research, in the above explained sense of search for evocative forms of motifs that are related to abstract painting.

There is obviously no aesthetic intention in the practical activities through which human beings, with the help of machines, are changing the landscape – it is the artist that, looking from an impossible perspective (the eye of the satellite, in fact), reads on the territory signs that he interprets as pictorial motifs.

At each significant finding the Milanese artist takes photographs, in other junctures he prefers to let the digital data stream continue to flow and therefore he realizes videos of the landscapes he encounters during his wanderings.
The photographs close down the circle by returning to a reality of matter and tangible surfaces.

As it is to guess, this incessant passing from one medium to another leaves, at each step, valuable heritage, an additional layer that, in addition to others, makes the works of Cadioli assume consistency across the stratification of language and media technologies, metaphors and shared conventions, grammars and specialized procedures, forms and meanings constantly centrifuged in social processes.

We are facing those loans from one medium to another, which McLuhan refers to in Understanding Media (1964), when he writes that “the content of a medium is always another medium”. This intuition has been more recently investigated, in reference to digital media, by Bolter and Grusin, who both interpreted the representation of one medium into another as a “remediation” or as a mode through which the new digital media “take into loan, pay tribute or enter into competition with their predecessors “(Remediation, 1999).

These dynamics are implemented in Cadioli’s abstracts journeys, where painting, the twentieth century painting motifs that the artist reads in the landscape, is remedied – whether intentionally or not – through agricultural technology, traditional photography, texture mapping, three-dimensional graphics, digital photography and video, editing software and, dulcis in fundo, the press.

Cadioli, who is deeply aware of every implication of his gesture, has fun using Google Earth as a brush through which he reproduces expressive patterns of the past century on his screen. He plays to shape the earth and, turning into a demiurge, he doesn’t show being a victim of the “Promethean shame” that plagued modern individuals towards their own mechanic creations.

Vito Campanelli

For Geers all modern materials possess a double meaning and multiple readings, according to their social, political, religious and cultural functions, attracting and repulsing at the same time in different contexts. This raw but poetic way of communicating happens as an invitation to engage rather than a dictatorial manner, for each spectator reads the works through their own identity and individual experience.
 
We find this delicate balance of danger and seduction, attraction and repulsion in a work like “Master Mistress of my Passion,” a beautiful virginal white Madonna like figure pierced with green shards of glass. As fragile as she is dangerous, she is beautiful to look at but impossible to touch. The broken glass shards that seem to emanate from within her flesh are an ancient universal technique that was used to protect the Villa Medici in Rome as well as countless suburban homes around the world. The Shakespearian sonnet that lends the work its title, refers to the poet’s secret love and Geers proposes that every border masks a fragile secret truth of human insecurity.

This reference to literature is a common practice in Geers’ work, as the codes and transformation of history and the inversion of structures of power are grist for his mill. A poet no less, he plays with words in his titles, creating multiple meanings and exploring contra-dictions with layers of reading that hide even more layers of reading.  Geers believes that at the Biblical origin of language, the confusion of tongues and Tower of Babel, lies the simple truth that language is a gift from God, but that the gift is a double edged sword that is as much a curse as it is divine. Given this sacred understanding of the word, he uses four letter words like magical charms.
 
The four letter word is a portrait of his working class origins, and of raw energy that marks a class socially and economically forced to live in conditions that by nature exclude poetry and metaphor. The four letter word is used as a sword that cuts away social flesh down to the ethical bone speaking with a tongue as sharp as flint stone. Most famous of the four letter words is “fuck,” a word that Geers explains is defined positively or negatively according to its use for “Fuck me” is an invitation to love but “fuck you” a declaration of war and Geers performs both simultaneously.
 
In the artist’s hands the four letter words become a mantra of transformation and elevate their profanity to a sacred end. Repeated like a chainmail, the visual mantra adorns “Cadavre Exquis,” a first generation cast from the original Nike de Samothrace in the Louvre. As with “Master Mistress of my Passion” and so many other works, it is not without coincidence that Geers has decided to embody the divine female, to embrace a female centred sacred space. The wounded female form is resurrected and leads towards another understanding of the possibilities of art.  The title refers to a method used by Surrealists to collectively embody a single image as each person created a part of an image unaware of what the others had done. The collective unconscious that Geers invites into his collaboration includes not only the spirits of artists like André Breton or Marcel Duchamp but also Nike, the ancient Greek goddess herself. Art he says, is nothing without “magick.”
 
The painted bronze sculpture “In advance of a broken arm” bears the same title as a work by Duchamp dating from 1915. We recognise the very natural pointing index finger that small children might use to express their desires before mastering a language or the ancient symbolic gesture of John the Baptist as well as the key to understanding  the alchemical motto “as above, so below.” This sacred gesture of the right hand points to the profane gesture on the left hand of the “mano figo,” a popular talisman to ward off the evil eye. Language is revealed here to be as symbolic as it is verbal for history creates habit that in turn gives rise to common socio-political and religious understanding.

Geers uses various tools to engage with his audience, encouraging them to reflect upon multiple readings and contradiction. The neon scultpure “Manifest” quotes the blue neon spiral line from a 1967 Bruce Neuman scupture “The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths,” but Geers has transformed art history to now recast the question as “What do you believe in ?” The answer he adds is subjective, leaving it in your hands to answer for yourself.