The Brooklyn Rail

Five years ago, Louisa Gagliardi was still largely unknown in the European art world. That changed overnight in 2022 with the presentation of one of her paintings at Art Basel’s Unlimited. Measuring some 12 by 36 feet and titled Tête-à-tête (2022), it quickly became one of the most talked about works at that year’s Art Basel. Eva Presenhuber, who had been keeping tabs on Gagliardi’s work, invited the artist to join her gallery and booked a show for her premiere Zurich space. Many who went to see it eleven months later were impressed, this critic amongst them. Tobia Bezzola, the director of Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana (MASI) in Lugano, also took notice, and soon returned with a curator. After a visit to the artist’s Zurich studio, the museum purchased a painting and proposed a solo show. That eagerly awaited event opened this February. Among the twenty paintings, many on view for the first time, two are so large that separate galleries had to be built within the 7,500 square space just to contain them.

Born in 1989 in Sion, Switzerland, Gagliardi came of age during the rise of the information superhighway. Like many of her contemporaries, she has spent vast stretches of time absorbing high-speed internet pictures, images that have increasingly become the defining visual constant of her reality. It is no surprise, then, that she makes use of a computer screen, a palette of digital colors, and a mouse to compose her paintings. Once satisfied with an image, she transfers its data to a large-format printer loaded with a roll of PVC. That glossy, waterproof material enhances the already artificial look of the images imprinted upon it. Looking at these paintings, one senses a certain programmed homogeneity, subtle but undeniable. Yet it is precisely this uncanny quality, combined with imaginative vigor, that draws the viewer in. These paintings not only comment on our A.I.-driven world, but also on its none-too-positive impact on those of Gagliardi’s generation. Consider the youngish, robot-like figures that populate these slick swathes of PVC. Seemingly cut off from others and out of touch with themselves, their bodies sometimes appear so wafer-thin that they must be without organs. In a word, they are simulacra.

Gagliardi’s recent paintings also articulate the existence of a flattened, matrix-like world, imbued with a stylized repetitive quality. Birds of a Feather (2023) tweets that out to those capable of tuning into such digital chatter. A young woman and man appear in the painting as near-copies of each other, wearing synthetic clothing. The woman is swallowed by a faux-spotted fur coat, while the man beside her sports a pleather jacket with an unnatural bluish cast. Though their gazes align, their expressions remain vacant. Whatever their eyes register does not matter; theirs is a world of resemblance without substance. And then there is what we see: the backs of the pair, leaning against a wire fence, where a few yellow and black birds have alighted. If the title of this painting alludes to the proverb “birds of a feather flock together,” then what coheres within it is neither the figures, nor the birds, but a deeper pattern—an algorithmic uniformity that, like the lattice structure of the enclosing barrier, underlies the entire image.

In Quiet Exit (2023) Gagliardi turned to a related subject: how digital tools might help her to go beyond the techniques artists have long employed to create illusionary images. René Magritte’s questioning of reality and the reliability of visual representations, as well as Salvador Dalí’s preoccupation with erasing the distinction between model and copy, certainly pushed her in that direction. So too does her knowledge of the fluidity of digital images, which enable endless experimentation with the stacking, altering, and collapsing of illusions. As the artist recently put it: “The screen … gives me the possibility of organizing all these million layers of any one thing, of playing with them by removing certain levels or adding another and so on.” Quiet Exit demonstrates Gagliardi’s knowledge of such technological sleights of hand. If at first the painting seems to be about a gigantic staircase, look again. All across the vertical face of its steps are patches of color and form which, once pieced together, yield the illusion of a desert landscape. Yucca plants, Joshua trees, tumbleweeds, and bluffs of rock dot this indeterminate mirage, which looks oddly familiar. Then one realizes why: it recalls the generic desert landscapes that sometimes pop up as screensavers. Meanwhile, flashes of light bounce off the hard edges of the stairs, softening them and giving rise to an additional thought: perhaps what we see is not a stairway at all, but an immense system of outdoor shutters. Left half-open their slats have not only caught, but are also reflecting images beyond their confines. The two “banisters” running near the edges of these “steps” might then be part of the pulley system of such a mechanism. If so, with a mere voice command the entire scene could snap shut, revealing another facet of its purely illusionary character.

Not every painting in this show, however, is as successful as Quiet Exit. The most disappointing is also the most ambitious. Curtain Calls (2025), is a vast work burdened by its own colossal scale. At seventy-two feet long, it fails to sustain a sense of tension. The almost hackneyed motifs—drapes, shadows, and moonlit vistas—that Gagliardi employs to pay homage to Surrealist aesthetics, do not help any. The upshot is that, rather than achieving the depth and complexity of its aspirations, Curtain Calls veers dangerously close to theatrical excess. Nevertheless, this exhibition should not be missed. Many of Gagliardi’s A.I.-assisted paintings are not only thought-provoking but also offer rewarding glimpses into what is rapidly becoming the defining force of today’s world.