Both phantasmagorical and sensual, Louisa Gagliardi's uncanny images begin as pencil drawings. She then scans her sketches, retracing them digitally using Photoshop, before printing them onto vinyl and applying varnish, clear gel medium, and nail polish. The resulting paintings are flat, luminous, and eerily smooth, executed in tonal palettes that at times resemble photographic negatives. Dancing between translucence and dimensionality, Gagliardi's compositions bridge the divide between the enigmatic and the banal.
Read MoreIn Palm Reader (2019), a pair of large, cupped hands holds four identically dressed and faceless figures wearing matching trousers and sun hats. The hands, figures, and textiles are all rendered in the same unsettling, waxy shade of pink, reminiscent of bologna cold cuts.
For her first solo exhibition at rodolphe janssen in Brussels, Notes for later (2017), Gagliardi pondered the solitude of nighttime, the liminal space that exists between sleep and scrolling through your social media feeds one last time. In Maze (2016), an androgynous figure appears backlit by a greenish digital glow, ghostly tears shimmering like liquid chrome against their glossy skin. Throughout the exhibition, similarly androgynous figures consider one another through lenses or gaze at themselves anxiously in shards of mirrored glass.
