En Plein Air On-Screen

Marcela Gottardo, Plein Air 18, 2020, plaster and wax, 30 x 20 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

2020 has been a humbling year, a series of dissonant narratives that could have come from a science fiction novel. The media first drew our attention indoors, to focus on safety and health during the global pandemic. Later on, that attention was redirected outward with protestors, politicians, and medical professionals in the field. Exhibition spaces were closed and shows were postponed, so screens and recording devices became the connection between the closed down world of everyday life and the untouchable world out there.

Marcela Gottardo, Plein Air 20, 2020, plaster and wax, 30 x 20 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

With a virus floating around, the open air became a space under scrutiny; populated areas witnessed curfews around the world. Artists tend to push boundaries, and Tuscany-based Marcela Gottardo brought her plaster sculptures into the field during the pandemic in her hybrid sculpture/photography project Plein Air.

Marcela Gottardo, Plein Air 12, 2020, terracotta, 40 x 50 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

The influence of Gottardo’s childhood in Brazil can be seen throughout her artistic career. Speaking on her background, she said: “I have wonderful memories of my very early childhood playing in my grandparents’ countryside home in south Brazil. The Atlantic forest was my playground. Most of my work draws from these memories of the forest, rocks, plants, insects, and found things. My house went over seven major remodels and we lived many years under the constant even of construction and destruction. Parts of my home didn’t make sense to me. Dead spaces with no practice or aesthetic purpose.”

Marcela Gottardo, Plein Air 16, 2020, terracotta, 40 x 50 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

Her thesis exhibition at Otis, A Descoberta, filled a traditional white cube exhibition space with carefully arranged mixed-media, plaster and pigment fragments and pieces. Another series, Poetics of Absense, draw attention to seemingly mundane forms, like cardboard boxes or a welcome mat. These sculptures and objects aren’t pure trompe l’oeil, but rather balance their physical and visual aspects. Certain objects evoke plaster bandages, while others contain impressions of architectural and domestic remains.

Marcela Gottardo, Plein Air 21, 2020, plaster and casting resin, diameter 20cm, height 15 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

What is art’s function in 2020? Viewers encounter art through screens as a flood of images connecting their minds to different places: traveling for the sake of taking more images, to recapitulate back towards the screen. Gottardo looked at the contents of her studio after years of working in her new home and made a profound choice: to place the work outside, in the open air, during a lockdown, for the purpose of exhibition on viewers’ screens. “For my work, I think it’s important to make apparent the structure of viewing and how that influences experiences. When time falls, you are not there anymore. There is just experiencing“, said Gottardo in an interview.

Marcela Gottardo, Plein Air 25, 2020, plaster and casting resin, 20 x 10 cm each. Image courtesy of the artist.

Gottardo’s Plein Air exhibition consists of a series of photographs with a short statement at the end. It hovers between sculpture and the photographic: how can we know what something feels like by looking at an image of it? As Gottardo puts it, “I’m aware of the immaterial quality of pixels and image records of artworks and exhibitions. I made a deliberate choice to make artworks that are physical in process, objective, and impersonal. I think the body and the hand have an intelligence of their own.”

Marcela Gottardo, Plein Air 36, 2020, plaster, flour, and silicone, 50 x 50 cm overall. Image courtesy of the artist.

The same Tuscan landscapes that were “immortalized in numerous Macchiaioli paintings of the late 1800s”, as Gottardo put it in her statement, appear to the viewer as a series of encounters with the artist and her sculpted life forms. Viewers find themselves walking step-by-step, witnessing Gottardo’s shadow in the frame, the hand of the artist visible through the consistency with which the objects are placed. At times, the objects seem to be there by chance. It is the knowledge that the artist laid them in the frame that creates a playful gesture during one of the most serious moments in recent history.

Marcela Gottardo, Plein Air 38, 2020, plaster, flour, and silicone, 50 x 50 cm overall. Image courtesy of the artist.

Gottardo turns these chance encounters during an everyday stroll through the park into a monumental work of art. “Completely alone, walking in the countryside in Tuscany, I notice the light coming through the leaves of oak trees creating different hues of green, light and shadow, the early spring weeks, and warm blue skies. I’ve witnessed these scenes many times in original artworks and reproductions of late 1800s plein air paintings found everywhere: museums books, doctor’s offices, restaurants, photographs, post cards, etc. It makes me wonder how mediated experience is and what art’s function is in these ways of seeing? Is there any direct experience? If so, is it actually non-experience? Who does the experiencing?“

Marcela Gottardo, Plein Air 10, 2020, plaster, silicone, pigments, wax, and resin, 70 x 120 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

Visceral material reality exudes from the sculptures in Plein Air: hollowed-out bones, the inside of an animal skin, fungal attachments on decaying buildings. The artist’s hand in the landscape is made apparent through the placement of these recreations amidst the summer florae. A sense of wonderment comes about in viewing the photographs as visual records of such encounters as our dystopian experience of art and reality becomes an opportunity for discovery. Gottardo’s Plein Air exposes viewers, in the safety of their homes, to a work of art that is participating in life itself: “I want to create new life forms by recreating natural processes. I think of matter giving life to animal and geological forms. For instance, I can mirror the process of stratification in geology that creates rocks through time, or I can destroy something I’ve made and reconstruct it, like a building that once exists, or by pouring material like the primordial soup to generate new life.”

Marcela Gottardo, Plein Air 9, 2020, plaster, silicone, pigments, wax, and resin, 70 x 120 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.