Nature, Interrupted
29 Arts In Progress, London collaborates with Identity Art Gallery, Hong Kong to present "Nature, Interrupted", a joint exhibition featuring paintings by two Italian artists Natalie Silva and Barbara Nicoli. Fusing Nicoli’s hyper realistic details of nature with Natalie’s dance’s like impressions, "Nature, Interrupted" pairs together two artists who are equally keen on holding intense dialogues with nature. They freeze it on their canvasses, mimic it, meddle with it and give it new life to find poetry from the depth of its complexity – and simplicity.
Natalie Silva likes to explore and document human’s interactions with nature, especially light and its infinite colours. She places people in an indistinct space and explores how the reciprocal action becomes part of the projection of our memories. As she reproduces these memories on her canvasses, nature takes on a different reality, it becomes art, where perspectives get thrown out of the window, and shadow is no longer a darker shade; it is a different colour.
A graduate of Luigi Bocconi University, German-born Natalie held her first solo exhibition at the Mudima Gallery in Milan in 2001. Since then, she has exhibited all over the world from Switzerland and Slovenia to London, Paris and Los Angeles. Silva currently lives between Italy, Paris and Los Angeles.
Barbara Nicoli is also concerned with the human's interaction with nature, and in particular in the delicate balance between human and nature coexistence, ruled by each side's ultimate quest for survival. Employing innovative use of techniques, materials and unpublished methods - such as the intaglio printing technique - Barbara makes visible the rhythm of the wind, even the sounds it makes blowing through the leaves as she juggles traditions and innovations.
Re-producing fragments of nature around her,Barbara, currently based in the Emilian countryside creates representations of the human language, where a system of signs and sounds integrate to form the world and its many complexities.
Natalie Silva explores the visible world, in a specific research that tends to focus on inserting the human element into an indistinct -willingly so- space; in order to read from one time to the another, volumes and forms that become projections of our memories.
The artistic research of Natalie Silva refers to the type of relationship between nature and its representation: “in-natural” because it is referred to nature, investigating its processes, its mechanisms. Reproducing them in painting, transforming them into something other then the natural element.This is how another reality is created, the reality of painting, the reality of art in general; a re-created reality “in-natural”.That’s why Natalie’s colors can be “in-naturally” yellow, purple, green or orange, that’s how these bodies assume in-natural colors (blue and purple, blue and green, blue and yellow, green and orange, creating what is called in optical physics simultaneous contrasts - since impressionism - exalting in the viewer the intrinsic luminosity of the painting.
