CARLOTTA BAILLY-BORG

The world of Carlotta Bailly-Borg is one of bodily collisions and knotted seductions. It’s a universe populated by bountiful selves as mutating forms, immersed in a pool of instinctual drives and restricted, slanted landscapes. Overlapping parts suggest an attempt to reach conjunction or an impossible completion.

Depicted both in solo and group formations and placed within tilted perspectives, Bailly-Borg’s ever-present figures engage in activities that imitate the raw nature of living beings where biological rhythms and exaggerated bodily extremities communicate with their surroundings. Where a stage is set, composition is only suggested as an oneiric range of coordinates: cut out and reassembled, these characters inhabit the scene in all their clumsiness.

Evolving from the sketchiness of preparatory drawings, the artist’s paintings retain graphic textures, using lines and contours to define permanently malleable shapes. Spillage and containment regulate the flux of raw desire gushing in between things, bodies crawling, awkward positions fleshed out. Curves are jammed and interlocked, often merging with the borders that shelter them; organic apertures meld with the enclosing lines. These beings fold toward a centre, reaching for the possibility of fulfillment, and direct their emotions toward it. Washy backgrounds entrap figurines in copulation, plastic bodies depicted between movement and stasis. Solid bones leave room for pliable matter.

Carolina Ongaro