AXIS WEB ORG
MA Stars

Strips of cotton canvas, painted in pastel tones of blue, orange, red, yellow, and purple, hang in a spider’s web around the viewers’ head, criss-crossing one’s lines of sight. The washing line-like installation appears to be quite a casual arrangement.

Installed immediately to the left of the door as you enter the first floor of the exhibition, at first the work seems quite incidental. However, this initial slightness transforms into a more complex, poetic and layered reading. Behind the strips of canvas is a roughly 30 x 40” horizontal rectangular section of rubbed paint on the wall. It seems as though the painted coloured strips have been rubbed into the wall at the height, shape and size of a painting, forming a kind of blurred landscape or the trace of a more intense and highly coloured painting that perhaps once hung there.

The paint rubbing also highlights and reveals the textures, indents and marks of the building’s brick wall surroundings. Notions of memories and gestures abound, referencing a possible palimpsest of the artist’s actions as well as the memories held within the Victorian site. There is a sense of the artist measuring time, space and the body through the different yet interrelated parts of the work.

‘Clotuna’ appears as though a landscape painting has been deconstructed and re-constructed in separate but connected sentences and stutters of its former self. Livia Paola Gorresio’s piece creates an interesting and complex relationship with the site whilst referring to the act and siting of painting itself.