| My work ranges from environmental subjects and issues to the self. When I play with time, I work with video and photographic sequences, and develop photographic installations and performance if the notion of space prevails. |  |
Lucia Pizzani
My work ranges from environmental subjects and issues to the self. When I play with time, I work with video and photographic sequences, and develop photographic installations and performance if the notion of space prevails.
All of my pieces explore the notions of fracture, anxiety, and transit in a process guided by action, movement, and transformation of the surface and the body itself, exposing emotional states as well as exploring formal aspects that seem to be closer to painting.
In regards to my photographic series Absent Portraits, Venezuelan writer Lorena Gonzalez talks about the idea of a post-modern fragmented body that is across my work. She closes her curatorial text by saying, “We finally obtain an artistic process where the vanishing and self-representative presences in Pizzani’s work are kind of an essential delirium. She liberates the self in some way or another. The shadow and its fall merge into these images with their surrounding environment, and a split individual walks in and out, in order to completely awaken—by means of photography in a shy gesture of light and certitude—the consciousness of her own death, the impossibility to achieve unity and permanence.”
In Plaster (2009), the room becomes the body, in a sculptural way. The movement marks the intervention, the body passing trough another body. This choreographic element is always present in my work. It has been called a “promise of movement,” because you only get a glance, a second of what happened. Almost resembling an afterimage, the tendency for absence becomes complete in another version of this piece where the viewer can only see the room with marks and humid shapes disappearing on the plaster walls. This new skin absorbs my flesh, the room as a living organism.
Susan Suleiman talks about contemporary artists influenced by surrealism. In specific reference to Francesca Woodman’s work, she suggests that pain is not the only way to “denature” a body; there is also aesthetic. I want to share in this idea that allows us to consider the roll played by the formal aspect of an artwork, and its conceptual consequences. The necessity to visually represent a body, to reassure, or to invent an identity, or to express its void, or its negative, are some of the questions behind my work. I am in search of a concave body, a skin that can cover like a blanket—inside this room and in my own head.
