Solo exhibition at ID: I Galleri in Stockholm. December 13 2024 – January 12 2025
The exhibition entitled We don’t know where the shore is consists of an installation including four paintings, a sculpture and a video piece by Magali Cunico.
A recurring motif in the exhibition are views of Paradis-like greenery where black areas partially obscure the field of vision.
They are based on the environments inside the Art deco greenhouse located in the botanical garden “Le Jardin des Plantes” in Paris. A place Magali often visited while she was participating in a six-month residency program at La Cité Internationale des Arts, in 2023.
Inside the greenhouse, the visitors find themselves in lush, encountered views of magnificent tropical plants, framed through openings in an artificial cave. The delimited view appears like a landscape seen through the camera lens, which frames selected sections and creates a distance between the viewer and the subject. Arranged scenes of untouched nature evoking a lost paradise, which have been composed according to certain aesthetic parameters to seduce and overwhelm. It resembles a scenography, a construction of reality that merges with the physical place. The place (the outside world) and the plants (nature) have been objectified and turned into backdrops, a stage where the viewer is turned into a passive being.
The paintings in the exhibition, appear as empty backdrops where the viewer’s position shifts between the role of the spectator and the actor. The dark areas that partially obscured the field of vision create a feeling of uncertainty. What is hidden from the viewer?
Different versions of the painting untitled Uppenbarelse are shown. A version painted on glass is slowly being cracked in the video work Splittra. The fragments of the painting have been subsequently rearranged in the gallery space to reappear in a new constellation.
By shattering the painting that took several weeks to make, Magali uses the artistic process as a method to examine our contemporary gaze.Fragmented and recreated through painting, the environments appear from new perspectives revealing the illusion of a safe and well-ordered world.
