letter
from paris : : matthew
rose
valentina
loi: through the looking glassIn
the corner of her apartment in Milan, Valentina Loi has stacked a dozen paintings,
and piled paints, brushes and a handful of new canvases on tables, an easel and
the floor. Paint is splattered all over the rug, glue and scissors and bits of
photographs lay scattered about. Yet, this busy nook is a working oasis for the
artist, a place where the 26-year old Italian-American retreats after knocking
back eight-hour days producing commercials for Italian television.
Because
she works with television, and makes paintings out of photographs, and videos
out of paintings, one is persuaded to think of Valentina Loi's objects as windows,
or sometimes mirrors. But Valentina is not exactly Alice whose trip through the
Looking Glass was both memorable--and surreal. One is apt to think of Loi's production
as indicative of the current generation of image makers. Her painted fantasies
stop at the level of the glass itself, and she is usually on one side or the other,
frozen, or observing.
Valentina
Loi's canvases in their layerings of photos, paint and wax more often than not
block the view, than reveal it--the opposite of television. Most of Loi's photographs,
the basis for the paintings, are in fact taken through windows--a large glass
looking at the belly of a swimming pool, through airplane portals, into and beyond
kitchen views at cityscapes. In one piece recently on view at the "Festa
di Maggio," in collaboration with Milan's Galleria Borgonio in May, she inserted
a small video camera inside a painting; a video of legs walking across the bottom
of a pool ran in a loop.
surfaces
that delay
One suspects that any cross-pollination of painting with photography
would be a long evolutionary process, and its mutations resembling an "appleorange,"
a meaty acidic treat. But do the two want to bed down together? If painting and
film make an odd marriage, Loi appears up to the task much like an alchemist or
genetic engineer or better, a midwife. But she is not without a sense of humor
and is post-modern enough to enact a contemporary deadpan in birthing these works.
Push
2002
Loi
will often lay a coat of wax in a somewhat messy way over the photograph and its
painted surface. It is a way of turning the painting into a fetish, encasing it,
preserving it, and in a way "delaying" its content to the eye. The effect
is a blur, a forced retinal delay, and that appears to be part of the message:
the cataract of seeing. Because these artworks resist easy access; and are not
pretty in a purposeful way, their successive skins need to be penetrated with
the eye and the mind.
Certainly
artists have hand-colored photographs (or even photocopies), used photographs
as a basis for hyper-realistic painting (think of Ralph Goings, Richard Estes),
or projected photographs on canvas which are then painted (David Salle, Marilyn
Minden). Here however, Loi attempts to obliterate one view with another. Her works
echo the confusion consciousness often yields. She seems quite aware of the conflicting
set of images, particularly in her forays in video.
"Les
Amants" (Homage a Magritte), Loi's 2003 video, an appropriation of the 1928
Magritte painting, The Lovers. Here, Loi's pair, with sheets bound and twisted
over their heads act out their futile passion. It's an erotic tableau vivant,
that too, delays. Her lovers reach for each other's passion through their respective
veils, succeeding in an odd and somewhat disturbing way. They twist and writhe
and do their best, never quite getting to each other. Magritte's is one of several
signature surrealist images. In that, it points to the unconscious through a looking
glass of desire. And in fact, Les amants was based upon a film still.
Les
Amants (Homage a Magritte) 2003
The
mixed marriage of painting and video is the subject of yet another 2003 video,
appropriately and banally entitled, Painting Versus Video. Here, in an arm wrestling
match, painting struggles against video. Hand-scrawled signs let us in on which
arm represents which medium. But does it really matter who wins? Loi's point is
not about the mounting of video installations in museums and galleries, or the
weakness of painting in the face of technology, but her own struggle, I imagine,
to mix these two disparate mediums. An applause track clues us in as to which
side is "winning." Since it is in fact a video we are watching, we know
who wins this particular conflict.
Painting
Versus Video 2003
The
fusing of video and photography and painting (via collage) enables Loi to accurately
transpose her personal aesthetic -- and her "dislocation." When looking
at these ethereal landscape paintings she produced in 2001 and 2002, one is essentially
looking out of a window of a moving plane or car or train, as in the doubled winged
Untitled (Why), 2002, and perspective (inward and outward) becomes the subject.
Growing up in France and Italy, and the US, Loi, much like her choices of media,
is a hybrid of nature and nurture, culture and caricature.
"I
am merging these different media into a vehicle to express my whereabouts and
my past," she says. "This coming together between video, photography
and paint involves the environment and myself. The video footage acts like a paintbrush.
It picks up and spreads the colors around the canvas screen."
She
suggests that painting supplies the emotion while photography supplies the structure,
but concedes that her works "are unrecognizable half-fictional landscapes."
Loi adds, "I think it's because I started making images as a photographer,
and wanted to combine the two." The combination is often disorienting, the
effects dreamlike.
Loi
says her current body of work is an attempt to locate the distinct sensation of
time passing, finding a death in that movement and recording it with film, or
paint. Merging the de facto "realism" of photography or video with the
willfulness of paint is very much inline with her notion of "half fictions."
While
not the subject of a painting series, a loop of her video, Untitled (Spit), 2002,
shows the artist, spitting out teeth in a broad daylight Freudian nightmare. Another
video, the eight-minute meditation, Push, 2002, is simply a finger inserted into
the artist's belly button in an attempt to indicate origins.
pocket
paintings
As if to derail the "looking" aspect of her artworks,
Loi produced some 300 photo/paint landscapes in mini pocket-sizes. She then gave
away these "Pocket Paintings," as gifts that literally came out of the
artist's pocket at Sal Randolf's "Free Manifesta," her open exhibition
at Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt in 2002. Small photos of wind turbines, empty roads,
cityscapes were covered over in paint and mounted on 2.5 inch squares of wood
and handed out to anyone who wanted one, or were given a choice of these tiny
artworks.
"It
was two very different things when I handed them out or gave people the choice
to pick one," she says. "But the relationship to painting -- which is
most nearly always exhibited on a wall, somewhat unreachable and untouchable--
was the key idea. The pocket paintings create a tactile experience, a portable
memory."
Sort
of like Alice's scrapbook.
In
November 2003, Valentina Loi will present new work in a one-person exhibition
at the Milan gallery Artopia. (Artopia Via Lazzaro Papi 2 1st fl, Milano; e-mail:
ritaurso@tiscalinet.it Web: www.artopia.it).
A catalog of the exhibition and Loi's work will be available. In December 2003
(through January 2004) Loi will exhibit at Galleria Montenapoleone Via Montenapoleone
6/A Milano 20135, Italy. Opening December 10th 2003 6 PM. This exhibition will
then move to Ravello (Salerno).
For
more information: http://www.valentinaloi.com/
++++++++
Matthew Rose is an artist and writer based in Paris, France. E-mail: mistahrose@yahoo.com
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