With my photography I try to convey lightness. Conversation with Beatrice Pediconi

Beatrice Pediconi lives and works in New York City. Her education took place between Paris at the University of La Villette, and Rome, where she graduated in Architecture in 1999 from “La Sapienza” University. Her work has been shown in international exhibitions including: Presences, National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rome (2023), Cinema Ephemera, Central Brooklyn Public Library, NY, (2020); NUCLEUS/Imagining Science, Groningen, The Netherlands (2017); Sequences VII, Real Time Art Festival, Reykjavik, Iceland (2015); Ensembles, Quand la Maison Européenne de la Photographie Collectionne, Les Rencontres d’Arles, France (2015); Untitled 2009, Macro Museo di Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2015); 9’/Unlimited, Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia (2013); The Polaroid Years, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, New York (2013); The Edge of Vision, Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, Oregon (2012). His works are in the collections of numerous public and private institutions including La Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Rome), Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris), Lucid Art Foundation (San Francisco), MACRO (Rome), Videoinsight Art and Science Foundation (Turin) and Collezione Maramotti (Reggio Emilia). Various are the artist residencies in which he has participated, among them: Djerassi Resident Artists Program (Woodside, California) (2019); Yaddo Artist’s Residency (Saratoga Spring, New York) in 2018.

GL. For most artists, childhood represents the golden age when the first symptoms of a certain inclination to belong to the art world begin to appear. Was this the case for you as well?

BP. Memories related to my childhood are very faint, unfortunately. Later in life, during my adolescence, I manifested an increasing interest in philosophy, a discipline that taught me the power of thought and its relevance to the investigation of deeper meaning about life, and existence -- both aspects that have since returned in my work as an artist. As a young girl, I felt like an alien, in a world I did not recognize; my nearsightedness, and the prescription glasses I wore, represented a burden, a barrier, and, at the same time, the possibility of amplifying vision by starting from a “deficit,” a lack. From there, perhaps, developed my interest in photography, that is, in something that gave me the possibility of deforming images, transforming them into something else, in order to prove that the real can be the result of a point of view and a sideways look at things: the real is never substantial, what surrounds us can have a whole other essence.

What studies have you done?

I come from a family of architects and orchestral composers; I would have liked to attend the Academy of Fine Arts, but my father did not allow me to, arguing that it would be better to get a university degree. We found a compromise in studying architecture at “La Sapienza” University in Rome. I loved all subjects related to drawing and was particularly incapable in scientific subjects. I loved the creative phase of design, but even then I was frightened by the relationship that the architect has to sustain with public clients in order to realize his projects. During my studies, I immediately began working in architectural photography as an assistant for the photographer Giovanna Piemonti, publishing in magazines to pay for my studies and a rent.

Were there any important encounters during your education?

Many people over these years have been relevant; two encounters in particular: the one with Giulio di Gropello and the one with Marilena Bonomo opened me to new experiences and paths in life. When I met Giulio di Gropello, a great visionary who between the late 1990s and 2000 was one of the most active collectors in Italy and abroad, it was to photograph his private collection. Giulio, on those occasions, told me, with infinite passion and expertise, about the lives of the artists and the works in his collection, describing their context in every detail. His enthusiasm overwhelmed me to such an extent that I was driven to continue my personal artistic research, conducting it in parallel with my study and work as a photographer. In 2000, meeting Marilena Bonomo-my first gallery owner-marked the beginning of a real period of transition. The first time I saw her, I showed her two series, Oltre and Corpi Sottili. Oltre consists of photographs of Italian architecture, related to each other - the ancient with the modern and the contemporary - in order to create a transversal vision of image and time, thus anticipating, also through the choice of the title, the beginning of a new research. With the series Subtle Bodies, on the other hand, Indian ink, released in water and photographed, allowed me to initiate a reflection on the transient and the invisible, leading me to the opposite, and in stark contrast, to what I had photographed until then. In the transition from the static nature of the architecture to the ephemeral movement of the ink traces in the water, I think what struck her most manifested itself. In 2004 Marilena curated the first solo exhibition at the Castello Svevo in Bari with the series Oltre, showing the public the deep conviction that drove me toward experimental research. I remember many conversations about how determined I was for change, moving away from the comfort zone and taking the risk to do so. I took that chance and, in 2006, presented the series Thin Bodies at his gallery venue in Bari. It was a success.

Beatrice Pediconi,

ediconi,

Beatrice Pediconi

Beatrice Pediconi,in

What role does chance, assuming it exists, play in what you do?

As in life, even in art practice, chance is something to reckon with: it can be decisive and point a way forward. Water, the medium I always use in my work and which is the basis of my creative process, is the medium through which I arrive at the final work by accepting a random quotient, which is impossible to control completely. The color pigments dissolved in water, as well as the photographic emulsions worked in contact with water-through a peculiar technique that I have implemented over the past few years-imply an aspect of unpredictability that I combine with an attention to the mobile and ephemeral nature of both existence and the image. Thanks to chance, the sign shows itself as an epiphany: this aspect is perhaps what most surprises me whenever I find myself immersed in the process.

If you had to describe your working process, what words would you use?

My research investigates the mobile, unstable, fragile and transitory nature of existence through the representation of fluctuating images generated by a process of transformation of matter that is impossible to control completely. The final work is the result of a series of actions in which different techniques (painting, drawing, video and photography) are used in succession and in an unconventional way. A research that always remains in the balance and refuses to fit into a precise category. Water is the medium through which this process manifests itself.

How do you choose the materials you work with?

The choice of materials depends a lot on what I want to represent and the idea I want to convey. At the same time, the choice is dictated by the concrete possibility of finding the materials themselves; therefore, sometimes I am also interested in reuse and recovery. Glass, for example, is a material that fascinates me and with which I would like to start experimenting but, living in America, I feel I have to put it off: collaborating with a glass factory in New York would seem absurd when I think of the professionals and artisans in Europe who have nurtured the history and tradition of such a fascinating everyday material. Glass attracts me because of its aspect of inherent fragility, as well as the power of fire that is involved in its production process. Working with glass, and by translation with fire, would be a bit like working with water-a mutant, moving process.

Water is perhaps the most important element in your work even though it is then the one that disappears while leaving very obvious traces of its presence what fascinates you about this element?

The initial impetus to work with this element came as a response to a personal trauma, at a time when I made water-through the creative process-a healing element. Water is at the origin of life on our planet and has a strong symbolic connotation for me that, in my research, passes through reflection on the human condition and its transience. I am intrigued by its being a mobile element, capable of making people imagine floating and light forms, the same ones that come to life in my works precisely through a process that starts from water to create a new universe of variable signs.

Are you interested in the idea of lightness in what you do?

Lightness means, by definition, agility, ease, speed of movement. A feather is light, just as light is a gas, in the same way as a thin fabric. These properties can be sought and recreated through sign, giving the work an internal characteristic of fluidity, of graceful movement. If my works came to convey in the viewer a feeling of lightness, for me it would already be a great goal achieved. What I aim for is to convey a message of hope and openness that counteracts the state of division, loss and deep crisis that defines our present; perhaps it is in these stimuli that my interest in a certain idea of lightness lies.

Beatrice Pediconi,

Beatrice Pediconi,

Beatrice Pediconi,

ediconi

Are you interested in the pictorial dimension?

I am intrigued by all techniques but especially by their contamination. Painting, although in an unconventional and non-exclusive way, has always been an expression present in my work, employed as a means to reach a state of transformation. I have used it, for example, as the starting point of my video works, to try to represent other worlds: in this case, painting appeared in a dynamic form, tempera and oil, dissolved in water, were called upon to generate explosions of color and matter, later transposed in the form of a moving image through video footage. This somewhat atypical use of the medium of painting has guided my research on more than one occasion, opening up multiple possibilities for meaning. In 2010, with the series RED, I made fluid, pictorial, food materials by employing them to paint on water; later photographed, the forms and movements originated by these organic elements served, at a deeper level, to exorcise a disorder, the eating disorder, by performing a creative and healing action. In my most recent research, with the series Let’s Talk about Flowers I employ painting on canvas by making use of natural pigments to create a background of homogeneous color to which I apply portions of photographic emulsion-obtained from previously made Polaroids, cropped and processed in water. Painting in these works appears in its pure state - the pigment of the background - and, mediated, in the encounter with photography - the emulsion that I use as a material for painting. From this gestural and atypical union, organic and floral forms originate that are even capable of giving rise to a subtle, barely perceptible bas-relief on the background plane of the canvas.

The idea of ineffable becoming seems to me to have its own centrality in your work, can you recount the idea of time that you try to focus on in your work?

I am particularly interested in how we use that time frame, which for each of us is inevitably a finite time, given by existence, whose value lies in what we do while everything flows by. That is why the idea of time in my work is closely related to the value that becoming possesses in its ability to introduce a transformative, mobile element. And it is this dimension that I investigate with my research. In Diary of a Suspended Time, for example, I have given the work a specifically temporal dimension given by the scanning in space of 43 lift emulsions, made during the first lockdown, one for each day of forced stay in Italy due to the pandemic. In this case I attempted to make time visible through sign annotations as in a set of diary pages.

ediconi,

ediconi

In your career you have experimented with different media, among them video: are you always interested in the idea of the moving image or do you prefer still images today?

In fact, video is a medium that I have used a lot. What fascinates me most about this language is the possibility of representing a process through the idea of movement. I have made five video works, and Gaea from 2015 is the last one I produced and exhibited in New York. As I already recounted, the contamination of different techniques and media is what drives my research, what allows me to go further and experiment each time, confronting myself with different expressive tools. Works on paper and canvas, as well as photographs, are by their nature still, as you say; in my case, however, they document a moving process, a constant becoming and transformation, as much as video. All of my works originate from a process of transformation of matter, and this aspect encapsulates an inherent and ever-present idea of change, whether still or moving images. However, I do not exclude resuming video as an expressive medium; I have in the pipeline the idea of working on a large multi-channel installation in order to recreate an immersive environment, as I did for the 9’/Unlimited exhibition at Collezione Maramotti in 2013.

What happens to the works when there is no one to observe them, can the existence of a work of art be without the presence of an observer?

I will answer with one of the quotes that has most influenced my thinking and that I have quoted in Presenze, the catalog of the exhibition project for the Gipsoteca room of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome (May-June 2023): "The question of the work of art, of its life. Beethoven’s last quartets are beautiful even when no one plays them, and the Passion according to St. Matthew, even if not exhumed by Mendelssohn and remained neglected throughout the ages of ages, would still be a sublime masterpiece. So would the buried and unknown Venus de Milo and so even the unknown perhaps destroyed works of Apelles. For works of art are ’spirits’“ (Fausto Melotti). At the center of the National Gallery’s Gipsoteca, in the rearrangement desired by Cristiana Collu, is a large table with various plaster and terracotta busts, once thought to adorn Italian piazzas and palaces and now part of the museum’s permanent collections. The busts have been positioned so that their gaze faces the surrounding walls in various directions. Invited to do a project for this place, I decided to create a dialogue between my works and these silent ”presences." I showed a set of large works on watercolor paper in which the marks traced through the use of photographic emulsion, subtracted from some of my previous works, imprint on the surface threadlike and fluctuating traces that testify to a personal experience and a collective memory characterized by states of isolation, division and loss. I have repeatedly fantasized that as the sun went down, when the museum was about to close its doors to the public, those same sketches might begin to move and dance, conversing with each other and with my works, both with stories and memories to tell. With this you will understand even more how much I recognize myself of the quote by Fausto Melotti with which I began to answer you: works of art are spirits, and they do not necessarily need the viewer to live and activate.

Where do you think the artist stands in relation to his work?

I always thought that the works were the children of the artists. Aren’t they!!!

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.