AARAU.- Starting from the two-dimensional medium of photography, Rachele Monti (b. 1990) creates immersive spatial installations. They are intimate worlds dominated by sensory impressions, featuring light projections, bright colours and dense surfaces, which Monti places in a tense relationship with one another in the space. Here the human body, a favourite pictorial theme of the reworked photographic image, assumes a central role.
In her artistic practice Rachele Monti engages with the non tangible, which she gives a concrete form in her works. The starting point for this is the human body, which she understands not only as an assemblage of skin, bones, muscles etc., but in the extended sense also as a vehicle for feelings and stories, for the unspoken and the unspeakable. The skin becomes a screen for the projection of the invisible, inner life.
In the 2016 work Longeva struttura erosiva, Monti papered the gallery with collaged photographs of naked body parts positioned on rocks and mountains, the boundaries between body and nature as well as inside and outside becoming fluid. In her installation Impeto (2019) Monti also treated the materials and pictures in such a way that they recalled skin-like surfaces. Even if the human body is not immediately recognized as a concrete subject of the pictures, the artist gives her works the properties of a body - with its own voice and skin.
Rachele Monti creates immersive spatial installations. She experiments with the technical possibilities of the photographic medium and often extends her results with the use of light, colour and mostly transparent materials on to which she prints or projects her digital images. She changes the photographic originals with gestures that are sometimes improvised, sometimes controlled and repeated, adding new levels. This method also deliberately leaves room for random and unpredictable changes. Furthermore, this process gives rise not only to new photographs, but also coloured prints on fabric or PVC, wallpaper, light projections, which Monti combines and arbitrarily overlaps.
Most of Monti’s previous works are informed by an introspective gaze, which places the inner life, the hidden and the intimate in the foreground. For her CARAVAN exhibition the artist extends this perspective into the outside world, incorporating non verbal interactions or invisible connections. As visitors we are immersed in a world dominated by sensory impressions, in which we now reflect not only what is happening within us, but also what is going on around us, in our immediate environment.
Rachele Monti, born 1990 in Faido (TI), lives and works between Amsterdam and Airolo (TI). 2019 Master’s Degree at the Dirty Art Department, Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam; 2014 Bachelor’s Degree in Photography and Visual Communication, ECAL, Lausanne.
Previous solo exhibitions (Selection): Impeto, Progetto 6000 x TART Gallery, Zurich (2020); Impeto, BNP Paribas, Lugano (2019); Dippold's delusions, Stoa42, Athens; Longeva sutura erosiva, Platz für Kunst, Rapperswil (2017)
Previous group exhibitions (selection): The And Of The World, Bijlmerplein 698, Amsterdam (2019); A Cold Open Show, ISO, Amsterdam (2018); Look at this fucked up bird I just met, LOSDOK, Amsterdam (2017); Sê plural como o universo!, La Rada Spazio per l'arte contemporanea, Locarno (2016); Cult+ - La mostra, Ex Macello pubblico, Lugano (2016); Jungkunst 2015, Winterthur (2015)
Curator: Anouchka Panchard, Assistant Curator, Aargauer Kunsthaus
