Margherita Moscardini

All art is contemporary, and increasingly international. I believe, however, that it is still possible to establish a useful link between a work of art and the context in which the artist’s sensibility was formed.

In Margherita Moscardini’s work, landscape is a recurrent theme, and, more specifically, the Tuscan countryside – not the version that can be seen on advertisements to attract tourists, but rather the one through which artists, ever since the Renaissance, have explored the relationship between space and representation, between vision and image.

The landscape is also a depository for time, experiential time, of things or of persons, which is either merely relational (and thus intangible) or else inhabited, i.e. by architecture, and is thus historical time.

How does our perception of a place change over time, an how can such a transformation be rendered by means of an image? Through often infinitesimal acts that modify our perception of a detail already perceived, isolate an aspect thereof, or which, through an optical sleight of hand, correlate two different places that would not otherwise come into contact, Margherita Moscardini readjusts our focus and prompts us to consider images in their intrinsic relation to space: simultaneously two-dimensional representations and three-dimensional objects, as idea and as action in space. The artist often uses light to highlight this ambiguity, as well as to depict the passing of time.

In The Landscape Project, the artist investigates the cityscape, on the one hand inevitably subject to transformation and erasure, as well as to restoration, and at times anachronistic acts of preservation on the other. The work is made up of all the pieces of glass found by the artist while crossing Milan, from center to outskirts, classified by quality and origin, and rearranged to form a map on the floor of the Palazzo Reale.

In this portrait or topographical representation of Milan using the waste the city itself has secreted, the glass, which previously served to frame the landscape, changes from frame to space. It is an almost invisible space, enlivened by the glimmers of reflected light.

After the exhibition ends, the glass will be melted and used to make windows. Some will be placed in empty buildings and others in private residences: a permanent intervention, thereby completing a process in which space is transformed over time.

But The Landscape Project also suggests how the landscape may be written back into the city’s history: the frame, the window, i.e., vision, becomes a temporary work of art, and is then recast in its role of framing the cityscape, potentially preserving the memory of these various moments and states.

Cecilia Canziani