![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/AP-Strangers-performance-b.jpg\")
Amalia Pica, Strangers 2008-2011. Paper bunting and performers. Courtesy the artist and Herald St. London. Photo \u00a9Polly Branden<\/p>\n Amalia Pica, Strangers 2008-2011. Paper bunting and performers. Courtesy the artist and Herald St. London. Photo \u00a9Polly Branden<\/p>\n
The tonalities of celebration and sadness in the ascendant artist\u2019s work
By Francesca Gavin<\/b><\/p>\n
It\u2019s a very simple motif \u2013 a string of rainbow bunting \u2013 and it\u2019s a theme throughout Amalia Pica\u2019s practice. She has shown these strands of small triangular flags hanging in a simple arch between chairs, as a performance held between two people at Art Basel Unlimited, against a crumbling wall, in front of a pasted swathe of photocopies. It is not the rainbow itself but colour in the wider sense that she is drawn towards. \u201cVery often colour gets in the way because it\u2019s so subjective,\u201d Pica explains to me over coffee in East London, not far from her Hackney Wick studio. \u201cI thought of making a lot of works in which I would try to see colour operating as code. I started exploring how certain colours operate and how the spectrum of colour also stands for the celebratory \u2013 which is something that I am interested in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Amalia Pica has got good reasons to celebrate. Her work has attracted some serious attention in the past 18 months with solo shows at Johann K\u00f6nig in Berlin, Chisenhale in London, Modern Art Oxford, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. She is an artist who works in series: motifs and repeated techniques pop up repeatedly in her work, from flags, Venn diagrams, semaphore, walls of pieced-together photocopies and quiet durational performances.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s something like an idea that is half formed and so I try to work it out to make it something. Then, making the colour or the shape or the way that it stands, makes me think about this idea again, and reshape that idea. That\u2019s very often why I work in versions of things.\u201d In some of her pieces, such as \u201cSome of that Colour #2\u201d or the similar \u201cCatachresis #8 (head of the nail, teeth of the comb, eye of the needle, head of the screw)\u201d, the flags are installed between chairs against a dripping watercolour painting made from splashes of rainbow-coloured paint. Here, there is a sense the colours are washing away, drifting; rather than the presence, the emphasis is on absence or dissolve. \u201cIt\u2019s an exploration on what colour does and what it doesn\u2019t. A lot of the works that are washed out, let\u2019s say, are me trying to capture that colour.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/AP-On-Education-j.jpg\")
Amalia Pica, On Education, 2008. Super 8 transferred to DVD. 04:03 min. Courtesy the artist and Herald St. London.<\/p>\n
There is a sense of something melancholic to these works. They resemble the remnants of a celebration, yet there is no party. In fact, often in Amalia\u2019s work there are no figures, just leftovers of their existence. The artist often has used herself in her performance or photocopy works \u2013 playing with a Casper David Friedrich-like image of the artist alone in the sublime landscape such as \u201cSorry for the metaphor #2\u201d (2010). These pieces are full of a sense of sadness, distance or melancholy \u2013 something she is evidently aware of in their making. In other words, Pica knows how to press emotional buttons. \u201cI think that there\u2019s a certain visual rhetoric to images and there are ways in which you can manipulate the viewer to feel nostalgic or melancholic. So very often the works that I have an impulse to make have an exploration on the manipulative aspect or the sort of ideology around romanticism or nostalgic images or grainy black and white pictures. I\u2019m interested in sort of creating those moods. Maybe\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
Pica, now 34, grew up in the small Argentinean city of Cipolletti. Her grandmother was a theatre director, and Pica began with a background in experimental theatre which grew into an interest in visual sets. She began working with a dancer friend as a duo, creating props or installations for performances. More recently she has lived and worked in London after a period in Amsterdam attending the Rijksakademie. Unlike many artists working with such a conceptual focus, Pica\u2019s work has a strong emphasis on the role of aesthetics and the physicality of things, a reflection of the influence of Latin American conceptual art. She reflects the influence of figures including Lygia Clark, H\u00e9lio Oiticica and Joseph Kosuth. What is celebration without remembering? Nostalgia in its widest and most complex sense seems to be at the crux of Pica\u2019s approach to art: nostalgia for place, for communication, nostalgia imbued in media. Those touch points include another recurring motif in her work, the Venn diagrams \u2013 often created by intersecting coloured spotlights such as \u201cVenn Diagram (Under the Spotlight)\u201d (2011). Pica became particularly interested in this form of information design, which was banned in schools during the Argentinean dictatorship because it was seen as a subversive teaching technique. \u201cThere\u2019s a nostalgia that comes with distance and there\u2019s a nostalgia that comes with time,\u201d she says. \u201cVery often I\u2019ll try to make timeless images that will be a collision of different moments in history. Very often there is a political decision in choosing moments or anecdotes or subject matter that seem harmless. People might be more open to look at them again.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/AP-Islands-f.jpg\")
Amalia Pica, Islands 2006. 35 mm slide sequence looped 8 times to fill a carousel. Courtesy the artist and Herald St. London.<\/p>\n
Considered more deeply, you could say that Pica does not make work that is representational, but rather work that is about presenting or presence, and about using what is available \u2013 from public monuments to dead antennas. This is artwork where communication breaks down and form doesn\u2019t fulfill function. Pica\u2019s work often highlights the relationship between human forms and shapes, exploring the slippery relationship between abstraction and narrative. Often there are physical or mental barriers to actual verbal communication. Talking can\u2019t occur. There are barriers to hearing. Pica made her own DIY antennas, playing with the idea of defunct technology. \u201cWhat happens if that tool is no longer useful or recognised? What happens to those thoughts?\u201d she wonders. In \u201cEavesdropper\u201d (2011) a gallery wall was filled with glasses and string so viewers could attempt to hear something when they placed their ears against them. Yet real communication was always limited, or failed. Part of the pleasure of her objects is the fleeting sense of humour and tragedy in this failed attempt to convey meaning.\u00a0 Her recent show at Herald St in London, in October, was an attempt to explore abstract visual communication through performance. Pica filled the gallery with Perspex shapes. Performers interacted with the objects and created new forms and colours in various compositions \u2013 holding themselves in a tableau for half a minute before mutating. The room constantly changed as the performers left the shapes in different places. Pica\u2019s whole practice can be seen here, in humanised geometry. A search for those moments, those ephemeral gestures, when everything falls into place.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/AP-Venn-diagrams-under-the-spotlight-a.jpg\")
Amalia Pica, Venn Diagrams (under the spotlight) 2011. Courtesy the artist and Herald St. London. Photo \u00a9Kiki Triantafyllou<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"