EROSIVA

Costanza Gastaldi

18 Oct –  16 Nov 2024

Novalis Art Design

G/F, 197 Hollywood Road, Hong Kong

EROSIVA

Curatorial text by Angelica Moschin

The exhibition “EROSIVA” at Novalis Art Design in Hong Kong presents for the first time a comparison between two striking photographic series by artist Costanza Gastaldi: the widely exhibited and internationally acclaimed, LOTO NERO (Black Lotus), and EROSIVA, an intimate project particularly dear to the artist.

The 80 large-format black-and-white landscape shots of LOTO NERO were conceived during the artist’s journey to Huangshan in eastern China. This solitary journey along steep staircases, marked by asceticism and challenge, was the beginning of a simultaneous detachment and rapprochement for the artist. It introduces a distancing from the world and its precariousness, and a new and powerful form of spirituality that would later find its culmination and fulfillment in EROSIVA.

LOTO NERO represents pure wandering, in the dual sense of both physical roaming and the agonizing uncertainty of the mind or spirit. It is an emotional and sentimental journey through physical obstacles, that faintly echo the psychological ones awaiting the protagonist, an emblem of constant soul searching, and an invitation to believe in imminent rebirth. Since ancient Egyptian times, the lotus flower has been associated with rebirth and hope. Each night, it sheds its petals, only to bloom anew with fresh petals at dawn. The technique used in both series is the extremely rare and fascinating héliogravure au grain (grain photogravure), an ancient printing process dating back to the 19th century that allows a photographic image to be etched in low relief through various chemical processes on a copper plate. This very fine-grained technique can capture both the subtle nuances of grays and the depths of blacks from the original plate. This gives the prints a precious tactile quality, prolonging and amplifying the creative process through its manual nature and making it almost permanent over time.

EROSIVA, on the other hand, is an ode to what is left inside us when everything collapses. It is an invitation to ponder on a topic that, in our view, has not yet been thoroughly addressed: the elusive relationship between female intimacy and illness. EROSIVA is from the contraction of two Italian words, eros and corrosiva (corrosive). It is a series of 17 photographs that captures the bitter dissonance between how a woman perceives herself during the various stages of healing— fully erotic, vibrant, and alive — and how others see her, as someone irreversibly marked by misfortune, devoid of desire, and separated from the rest of the world. Shot after shot, the project portrays the image of a dignified woman, at once strong and fragile, who appears and disappears behind a thick, almost shroud-like veil, only to emerge stronger than before. The contours of her silhouette, initially contained by a delicate tension that could break at any moment, weakly surface from the depths of a dimly lit, almost timeless room. They gradually become more vivid, lively, and enriched by an outlined life, to the rhythm of experience inexorably approaching form.

EROSIVA is a story of reconciliation, of a slow and painful inner excavation to make peace with oneself, one’s history, and one’s body despite everything and everyone. Through a few short poems written by the artist following the typical Japanese haiku scheme (an essential yet highly evocative poetic form, originating in the 17th century), the most delicate and painful chords of a woman emerge without ever fully revealing themselves. Through the redemptive potential of acceptance, she finds the courage to face illness head-on and to look ahead, beyond all pretense, at her reflection in the mirror. It’s no coincidence that the artist chose to open this collection of poems, an artwork in their own right, with an iconic verse from the Chinese sage Tao Li Fu: “Place a stone on your shadow and start running.” This once again symbolizes the importance of separating from oneself, or part of oneself—whether it is that stubborn wound that seems impossible to heal, or just the dreadful question looming on the past and reflected in the future—to return to oneself at a higher stage of Being. This phrase briefly encapsulates and explains the full meaning of these two, distinct but complementary, photographic series and their splendid conceptual intertwining.

Just as it is impossible to focus on and judge an object too close to the eye in the physical world, on a spiritual level, a certain distance is necessary to finally see oneself. Ascesis enables vision. Without some degree of detachment from the world, we would be blind. Contact, by nature, is blind. Thus, the artist, feeling the fragility of life weighing heavily upon her, decides to retreat into silence and begin her ascent (both physically and spiritually). An ascent with the hope of finding nothing else other than herself – her whole self , body and mind – at the top of those harsh mountains, be it an answer or relief. Loto Nero was born from here. However, once she has reached the peak, the categorical imperative, following poet Giorgio Caproni’s words, seems to be: “She must return to the valley. She seeks ahead what she left behind.”

Ascesis is nothing more than this, than the boundless love for the creatures and things of the world. Not absolute rejection and detachment, as many erroneously believe. Only those who have truly loved life can understand and desire detachment from it and ascesis. However, this love demands the re-evaluation of everything and a shift in perspective. It is a love that leads one to ascend only to come back down to the flesh of the world and one’s own, to everything that was left in the valley.

Yet, it would be incredibly simplistic to say that LOTO NERO is a variation on the theme of detachment (from the body) and EROSIVA, which follows logically, on reconciliation (with the body). These two equal and opposite movements—ascension and descent, separation and reattachment, division and union, peppered by moments of reassessment that is intrinsically part of the artistic gesture—coexist in perfect synthesis and tension. They coexist not only in each of the projects analyzed here but throughout Gastaldi’s work, giving it semantic circularity, breadth of scope, and therefore life. In this exhibition that seeks to convey the emotional tone of a complex journey, every beginning coincides with its end and vice versa. EROSIVA represents the natural evolution of LOTO NERO and provides a landing – certainly not the terminus of conceptual exhaustion. The journey can resume at any moment, and so can the ascetic exercise.

Hungry for beauty, her eye strives to create works as aesthetically captivating as they are rich in material research which is reminiscent of ancient techniques of photographic surface manipulation and close to the realm of pictorialism. In a digital age where everything is consumed at a much faster pace from the past, what is readmitted in Gastaldi’s work is one of the most poignant meditations on what matters most: what is real, la réalité rugueuse, that raw quality that inevitably characterizes the experience of beauty. In the end, at the height of virtual dematerialization, knowing how to navigate between a disembodied world and the desperate flesh of the world is everything.

SELECTED WORKS