Francesca Gabbiani: Daydream

Galleria Monica De Cardenas is pleased to announce the first solo show in Italy of Francesca Gabbiani (Montreal 1965, lives and works in Los Angeles).

Each of the works is composed of a collage of colored papers, on which the artist intervenes with acrylic paints and watercolors. The collage technique creates an apparently stylized, flat composition, but the resulting images are actually carefully reworked reconstructions of interior and exterior scenes from films, usually with a subtly sinister, menacing atmosphere.

The images are references, citations from films by great directors of the golden age of horror of the 1970s and 1980s, like Kubrick and Dario Argento, but also Pasolini. The artist selects above all those sets and settings that already stood out, in the original films, for their artificial, stylized appearance. In this sense the process of reconstruction of the image with surfaces of colored paper brings out the graphic, chromatic and visual impact of the spaces, drawing them into the foreground by removing the narrative aspect and the presence of the actors involved in the film’s plot.

In these architectural settings space seems to be continuously sublimated from three dimensions to the two-dimensional space of the painting, also thanks to the vivid presence of bright colors, which together with the decorative aspects of the interiors generate a dreamy, surreal atmosphere rich in figurative and psychological references, accentuated by passages like doors, thresholds and staircases, and viewing points like windows and mirrors, suggesting a disturbing interpretation of space, based on continuous reminders of other places and other situations.

The works that depict outdoor scenes have a threatening look, often dominated and disrupted by fire. In these landscapes the artist focuses on light: whether it is natural or artificial, the light gives the images a level of interpretation that is always highly charged in expressive and emotional terms. In certain works the fire element seems to penetrate the interiors in the form of a tamed force (the flames of candles) or a disruption (a blaze), as if to symbolically break down the barriers between inside and outside, nature and artifice.

The installation of the exhibition suggests a visual itinerary rich in contrasts, bringing out the clear oppositions and points of encounter among the various works, emphasizing a sense of uncertain spatial perception, and creating a continuous multiplication of environments and forms with the interior of the gallery itself, between solids and voids, colors and surfaces, image and decoration, reality and fiction.

Francesca Gabbiani
Daydream