Angelina Gualdoni

The mangled supports of a delapidated structure are silhouetted against a chemical sky like wild brambles. Midway belongs to a series of recent works depicting a world in constant change, prey to mankind's malevolent inattentiveness. Abandoned buildings are eaten up by the ground on which they once proudly stood, subservient partners in a dialogue between the natural and man-made over which they have relinquished control. The role of chance is apparent in both the painting's subject matter and technique. Drips, spills and stains create a force of abstraction that threatens to engulf what remains of the representational imagery.

Nocturne portrays an abandoned shopping mall in the American midwest, found through the internet like those in Midway and The Slow Continuum, and visited by the artist in person. Unprofitable or subject to protracted legal dispute, they have been marginalised by society and neglected by all but the occasional pack of wild dogs or thrill-seeking adolescents. They are here presented as territories in limbo, modern ruins vulnerable to nature's entropic processes of recovery and repossession. Beneath a dark, threatening sky, trees and weeds surround and fill the buildings exerting strain on their physical structure, while a slick of poured paint seeps like bloody entrails into the foreground.

Praca dos Tres Poderes is a large, imposing square at the heart of Brasilia, the political capital of Brazil. Constructed between 1956 and 1960 to a design by visionary architect Oscar Niemeyer, and heralded as a landmark in contemporary urban planning, the city has come to be seen as a terrible utopian failure. Functionless, soul-numbing, and inhospitable to human trafffic, it today stands as a dated, retro icon, and a symbol of the death of Modernism itself. Gualdoni perfectly captures this emptiness, portraying a vast expanse of barren sky above the deserted pedestrian plaza, empty but for the discarded trolley of a popcorn vendor. The present, it is all too clear, is elsewhere, and the future is one of hushed uncertainty.

The Slow Continuum That Proceeds in Your Absence

2005
acrylic and oil on canvas
152 x 183

Working from her own photographic documentation, Gualdoni depicts suburban architecture in a state of melancholy abandonment. Reclaimed by nature, the structures assume a life of their own as remnants of failure and unfulfilled expectation. In The Slow Continuum, weeds and young trees in the open concrete atrium of an elevated building are bathed in light from a momentary cloudbreak, evoking feelings of nostalgia and otherworldliness and hinting, perhaps, at the possibility of a more positive future to come. A similar sense of restrained but palpable emotion saturates those other works by the artist presented here.