Invites: Gaia Fugazza

Gaia Fugazza’s work is primarily interested in the routines and choices that shape daily life. Figurative images relating to intimate yet common scenes are set in intriguing and highly textured pictorial spaces. Bodies touch and gesture in delicate layers of pigment on glass, and in lines scratched into wood and filled with wax. An aesthetic and narrative emerges that is set in a deliberately ambiguous time and place.

For her Invites exhibition Fugazza presents new and recent work informed by her experiences of motherhood, travel and the process of making objects. This personal body of work is also an open-ended reflection on how circumstances determine our actions. In a work on plywood titled Lots of Choice (2015) a black frame and small swiping hands recall the way Fugazza’s young son resisted ‘full screen’ options when watching Peppa Pig online. Instead he preferred to keep open the possibility of clicking on other options. Fugazza folds this observation into her wider concern with the idea of contemporary distraction.

A large glass sheet, responding to the proportions of the gallery space, has been pasted with a frame of delicate red pigment and paper to form a window through to the other pieces on show. This screen, with its curved corners, also evokes the form of mobile devices. Rather than merely commenting on the impact of technology on our lives, Fugazza instead tests out processes that might question our relationship to notions of productivity. Making pigments in the studio from raw materials, both foraged and purchased from shops, Fugazza experiments with methods of production. That this might involve wrong turns and different types of waste, is an intrinsic part of her wry look at how ideas of both newness and a certain ancient authenticity are readily co-opted, packaged and consumed.

Gaia Fugazza (b. 1985, Milan, Italy) completed an MA Fine Art, Chelsea College of Arts, London, 2014. Recent solo exhibitions include Studiolo #9, Spazio Cabinet, Milan, Shikinen Sengu, Nuova Icona, Venice, both 2013, and La quadratura del sasso, Room Galleria, Milan, 2012. In 2015, her work was included in Mediterranea, Young Artists Biennale, Fabbrica del Vapore, Milan, The London Open 2015, Whitechapel Gallery, London; Hrm199 Ltd, Museum Tinguely, Basel, and Studio Voltaire Open 2015, Studio Voltaire, London.