Giuliana Grippo

Residency Programme : June – July 2016

June 2016

Giuliana is a graphic designer, and until now her artistic work has been developed through drawing. She takes as a reference found objects of random phenomena, apparently insignificant, but formally attractive for her, Giuliana extracts not only the shape but the gesture that instigates when reproducing them. Paying special attention to this gestures, she leans through them, as indicators of fragility, violence, rhythm, destructured… she finds in this way of drawing and intimate performativity which she attributes more value than to the drawing/trace.

During the residency, Grippo started working with the material potential of the founded object, to later relate to it through the body.

The surrounding of Blanca is full of dead prickly pear, and Giuliana poses her sight in the internal structure of its leaves, a fragile tissue, strong in its multiple layers, that Grippo deconstructs to transform this leftover into a new skin.
The referential object not only provokes the gesture that leaves a trace, but becomes a prosthesis that prints in the body behaviours of estrangement and assimilation.

July 2016
Shedding the image, inhabiting the absence
Installation, drawing, video, Performance.

Contemplating, stopping, finding a meaning for the insignificant and walking in a thousand directions at the same time. It is the relationship and not the single objects that create the meaning, the space between things.
Giuliana creates images that work in sets to transit in a rhizomatic way. Interested in the traces of time, in the impact of events, her work has somatized the invisible and the context that surrounds it.
In the transit from image to the performative experience, Giuliana ceases to visually perceive her own work and rather inhabits it and exhibits it, as it becomes part of her.
The certainty is confirmed when intuition is felt in the flesh and experiences the strength of showing (without seeing) one’s own fragility.
The last work of Giuliana addresses the concave and the convex. Turned inside out it metamorphoses from container to content, circled and surrounded.
While the concave limits the interior and defines with authority the shape, the convex highlights the air that surrounds it; it surrenders to the will that encircles it. Its significance is placed in this air, in the vacuum that besets it, in the void that engulfs. It is a dialectic of the absence “the fundamental state between the gaze and the loss”(Didi-Huberman,1997). As if we open a hollow rubber ball to turn it inside out and leave its exterior (its recognisable facade) facing an hermetic interior, denied to the eye.

Then its original interior is left to the mercy of its surroundings.
If the concave represents the authoritarian decision, the domain of the image; the convex surrenders to the vacuum and becomes consequence.