Gallery Artist
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Ludovica Gioscia's work reflects the 'Electronic Baroque' times we live in. Gioscia employs found and hand printed wallpapers to create environments and three-dimensional structures, where Baroque sculptors used marble as their medium. Both imitate the fluidity of fabrics crafted from other materials. However, the permanence of stone is replaced with the fragility of paper suggesting the disposable, consumer culture of today.
Hand screen-printed wallpapers are mapped with patterns containing symbolic elements that reflect artificial spaces such as Baroque scenography, rave dance floors, Las Vegas casinos and videogame arcades. Each of these spaces is host to rituals of a cathartic nature, much like the anti-masque in Baroque theatre. Gioscia captures their cacophonic visual overload by applying layer upon layer of wallpapers, then ripping down sections to reveal the juxtaposing under layers in her large-scale installations. This in turn creates a scrambled visual language reminiscent of today's media be it torn posters on the street, internet windows, Photoshop layers or the high-speed collage of MTV. In Gioscia's work wallpaper acts as a symbol of the seduction of culture by special effects.
These decollage room-filling interventions have lately collapsed into clustered sculptures that echo the mutations in Bernini's endlessly folded draperies as well as scaled up versions of stickers and buttons as the jewellery found in today's club culture. Gioscia's wallpaper sculptures are a decorative nightmare where the surfaces have crushed and regurgitated themselves into something subversive. Still commodities, however, they remind us that ornamentation is both a fiction and a powerful political tool.
Like courtesans having affairs in Louis XIV's carefully designed labyrinths, or the tourists meandering through the controlled pathways in Disneyland Gioscia's works suggest that we have surrendered freedom in favour of its illusionary surrogate.