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L’Io e L’Es by Evita Andújar
5 April 2024 @ 18:00 - 5 May 2024 @ 18:00
On Friday, April 5, 2024, the exhibition spaces of Rossetti Gallery will host the opening of “L’Io e L’Es,” the new exhibition of Andalusian artist Evita Andújar. Three years after the great success of the last exhibition at Galleria Rossetti, the artist is back to Genoa, presenting unreleased paintings, created especially for the third exhibition that the gallery dedicates to the artist.
The exhibition will open to the public on Friday, April 05, from 6 p.m. It will be possible to visit the exhibition until May 05, 2024, during gallery opening hours.
The focus of Andújar’s research revolves around a personal representation of the instances theorized by the world’s most influential psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud: the artist skillfully transposes and reconciles on canvas the relationship between the “Ego”, the conscious component of our personality, the one with which we present ourselves to the world, and the “Id”, our deepest part, the set of hidden drives and instincts.
CRITICAL TEXT OF THE EXHIBITION L’IO e L’ES OF EVITA ANDUJAR
“At this crucial moment in history for the history of images, at the dawn of an era where some would like to leave to machines and artificial intelligence the task to build the iconographic baggage of our future, painting, paradoxically, would perhaps seem to be the medium best suited to react to such a situation and to provide unprecedented response and reflection capacity in the face of the iconic cocoon that envelops our lives immersed in digital networks.
Evita Andújar rightfully belongs to the recent generation of painters who deal with an innovative and coherent way with the visual and intellectual stimuli coming from the web and, in particular, from social networks, working with coherence and rigor on some central issues that mark the landscape of our present and what will be our future.
It is very interesting, moreover, to note that in this new context of the visual arts there are many female painters working through visions that differ in their complexity and incisive force.
Moreover, Andújar has the advantage of a rigorous work structured on a solid stylistic ability derived from her long experience in the field of restoration (often on very important construction sites) and from her studies made in Spain with Antonio López García, one of the greatest living painters, of whom she does not seem to be an epigone but a continuation of reflections on the active dialogue between painting and photography.
Not surprisingly, the artist makes use of a pictorial drafting that manages to combine exactness with rapidity, fluidity with the clarity of the image, effectively concentrating the architecture and chromatic pulsation of her paintings, always declined with a synthetic ability to capture the load-bearing elements of the coloristic drafting that builds the form in a sharp and vibrant way.
Andújar thus uses her talent for her ready-made research on the universe of images that accumulate on the web, carefully choosing photographs, taken especially from Instagram, of unknown girls that she then manipulates and transforms with brushes and color on canvas.
The painter cleverly challenges the banality of certain images and transforms them into an insight that has the power reserved for works of art and their special ability to penetrate and interpret the multifaceted realities of the world we share.
In fact, these paintings are marked by an apparent chromatic happiness, linked to their sources of origin, which Andújar manages to coagulate in her translucent pictorial textures that, however, leave a clear sense of unease, a jarring element that undermines the lightness and narcissism of the (self)representations that follow one another on Instagram.
Therefore, the artist deliberately steals the selfies of the girls on her canvases, but this operation, however, is not one of simple and trivial plundering, and her painting achieves the purpose of giving a contemporary dimension to the age-old theme of the double, of a possible alter ego that overlaps with our personality.
In fact, the young women in these works are caught in their private and doubled dimension, as if in a mirroring or, rather, a reverberation of their face, which echoes in the works as a kind of (intended) disturbance of that perfection that the original photos would have wanted to convey.
The meaning of this research thus seems to provide shape and meaning to the splitting of our lives, suspended between reality and virtuality, in a fusion where the (supposed?) truth of “real life” often seems to get lost in the space of the net and where the many possible realities increase out of all proportion in an infinite labyrinth of representations.
The Self and the Shadow then stand side by side in the theater of stolen and manipulated self-portraits, personalities blur and multiply prompting us to wonder about the identities and otherness of these pictures, whether the people observing us really exist or are just holograms projected in social networks.
Andújar’s work achieves a further and deeper result, however, that of revealing the enigmas behind stolen selfies, by giving a dignity and visual presence to images otherwise destined to dissipate in a few minutes, slowing down the time of the pixels that form those photos by enclosing them in the fluid body of painting, transforming the ephemeral into the lasting and discovering the secret and private poetry of minimal everyday existences.”
Text by Lorenzo Canova
