These features are the effects of extensive experimentation with materials and processes. Drawing, collage, painting, photography, and sculpture are all in negotiation. Despite their specificities, they produce a strange visuality that threatens the limits between subject and object, animate and inanimate, interested in declassifying forms, confusing us, cheating categorizations.
Julia Gallo’s works are like dense, nebulous shadows, with a graphic appeal that comes not only from the charcoal that scratches the surface but also from the scissors that cut the paper. Bathed in coffee, they gain a sense of unity that blurs the outlines, making the different parts of the composition indistinguishable, muddling our perception. An attentive eye, however, is capable of identifying anthropomorphic and zoomorphic fragments that are never complete, like mirages stored in amorphous smoke, secret images in mutation. Its surface pulses very little, but rather invites us inside, introspective. They keep with them an enigmatic or mythological dimension, difficult to locate historically and geographically.
Although her bodily expressiveness converses with classic anatomical studies and observational drawings, her relationship with tradition seeks to awaken what lies dormant beneath the precision of drawing. If Western art history recognizes in the line “the basic structure of the idea,” here, projective reasoning gives way to phantasmagoria, to the psychic fantasy of visions. Gallo’s graphic gesture does not seek to organize the world but to densify shadows, those negative forms that, unlike reflections (where the double is mimetic convergence), are indicators of a mysterious otherness. With a certain pictorial flirtation, the drawings strive not for the sharpness of the line but for a haze or stain, shapeless enough for us to project our own desires onto them. She scrutinizes the uncanny.
Marina Woisky, meanwhile, acts as a taxidermist, giving flesh and skeleton to the skin of the images. Her references come from the kitsch universe of antique shops and private collections of exotic items from many origins, capable of converting brutal beasts into docile ornaments. While the decorative impulse tends to domesticate what it touches, the artist works to pry these forms away from their secondary condition, altering their scale, intervening in their compositions, printing them in fabric, sewing them, and, finally, filling them with cement (which, to the eye, looks more like soft flesh). Lions, elk, sheep, horses, bears, dogs, once bound to be hunting trophies, taxidermy molds, and other decorative objects, acquire a new grotesque appearance, as though they have recovered some animality. The images are given new life; the beasts awaken, even at the heart of the simulacrum. Ironically, they recover some hint of the natural world, for which our linguistic codes are always failing.
Yet, there is no moralizing in these successive processes of the image. By reconciling ornament and figuration (the apparent Roman contradiction of those who decorated walls with monstrous forms, as Vitrúvio described), the grottesche created methods of existing between classical beauty standards, metamorphosis, delirium, and extravagance. Woiksy’s sculptural facsimiles are creatures not satisfied with simply being themselves, they perform themselves as hybrids, simulating other identities. We are dealing with the world of appearances, but not to condemn them. From the original animal to the ornament, from the ornament to the photograph, from the photograph to the fabric, from the fabric to the sculpture, a chain of visual traces that accumulate anachronistic and heterogenic times is structured, still capable of touching the present through means of mutation.
It is also striking that there are constant situations of hunting and predation in both productions, expressed through agonized mouths, twisted and sinuous volute-bodies, allergic to any linearity. Like beating wings captured in amber, they condense traces of movements that seem only temporarily frozen, they are the captured moment that immediately precedes or succeeds the gesture, as though they keep with them a certain disruptive potential, on the verge of a new awakening. Together, we remember that each form holds a species of life and that the images, far from passive, are always at the edge of convulsion.