LucaPozzi: U-Drawings
Press release:
U–Drawings, curated by Carson Chan, is a new project by Luca Pozzi, presented during Start–Milano (September 2010) at Galleria Federico Luger. Fundamentally, the project examines the potential of drawing as a primitive practice that has endured throughout the succession of historical eras. A basic tool that has always been used to design, understand and visualize, U-Drawings approaches drawing as a device for experimentation, a technology with which to reveal aspects of space and time.
Starting with the scientific groundwork laid by Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli’s innovative Loop Quantum Gravity theory, and French engineer Raymond Aschheim’s Crystalline Hyperdiamond conjecture, Pozzi connects these scientific ideas in a cycle of installations, sculptures and drawings, visually suspending them within the context of an art exhibition. The U-Drawings were made by slowing the light emitted from a high-frequency photon spray, and delaying its disappearance by capturing it on a phosphorescent surface—the green glow frozen in photographs; a refusal of its vanishing.
Light, a major creative force for this exhibition, is understood as an element that ties together various physical processes. Within Loop Quantum Gravity theory, every known matter is a result of a dialog between particles that communicate through photons. For Pozzi, drawing with light channels the medium’s ability to travel at unmatched speeds and connect distant places. Light is also a material shaping the forefront of science today: In 2003, Nicolas Gisin at the University of Geneva teleported a single photon two kilometers from its origin. Formulating his spin networks in 1971, Roger Penrose theorized that everything, in fact, is the produced by the behavior of light.
In keeping with the logic of LQG, Pozzi similarly employs light as the basis for a creative architecture. The forms generated are born from the intersection between science, art, religion, philosophy, literature and Pozzi’s biography—permutations of various vectors made meaningful by the work. Like Supersymmetric Partner (2007-10), shown in Pozzi’s solo exhibition at the Museo Marino Marini in Florence, the artist’s agency is seen as a conduit for these forces. Closing the gap between the second and third dimension, Pozzi positioned himself in front of Paolo Veronese’s banquet paintings in a series of photographs, bringing the dimensions together in the photographic capture of a physical gesture, a release of energy. The moment the shutter opened, Pozzi launched himself into the air, and as the shutter closed, he was fixed in an image as a floating body in front of the giant canvases. In Schrödinger’s Cat through Piero della Francesca Influence (2010), Piero della Francesca’s famous hanging egg from the Brera Madonna is rendered in three dimensions, electromagnetically levitating over a tatami mat. Recently, Pozzi exhibited 9 Churches 9 Columns at the 3rd Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art. The piece, made for the exhibition, drew inspiration from St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow.
Beyond his meticulous matrix of references, Pozzi’s work comes from a practice that involves multiple other voices. Each project is formulated from theoretical contributions made by other researchers and artists by way of interview conducted by Pozzi, and subsequently published in accompanying catalogs.
U – Drawings is the result of a sequence of previous exhibitions, which includes: W.O.G.U. Workshop On Grand Unification Pennsylvania-Italy 1983/2009 (Galleria Federico Luger, Milan – Galleria 42, Modena), M. Southern California-Italy 1995/2009 (Galleria Enrico Astuni, Bologna/Pietrasanta), A.E.W.O.M. [Le strabisme du Dragon] (Museo Marino Marini, Florence) and 9 Churches 9 Columns (3rd Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art, Moscow).
