BRUSSELS.- The method of loci is a mnemonic device used for perfecting the act of cognitive recall, designed to enhance memory’s function through the construction of a mental form of architecture1. The “memory palace”, as it has often been referred to, is an immaterial construction visualized as a familiar space, or place. The intent is that through memorizing a particular site, one can train the mind to enact specific recollection based on the location of information within this mental architecture. Visualizing oneself searching for knowledge in this way is considered a method of enhanced recall, one aided by this palace of the mind. A mind palace is often familiar to its maker. It could be an ornate folly or as simple as a stone structure, like a house. When navigating the enclaves of the mind, memory operates as the mortar for the bricks from which this architecture is constructed.

In the house Louisa Gagliardi builds, memory is neither flawed nor fixed, it is a viscous material imbued into the structural environs of the subconscious. Here the mind oozes through recollections of lived and cinematic experiences. Events are obfuscated between fact and fiction while smeared across smooth and glossy surfaces. Iridescent and translucent, meaning slips along shapes, places, and people, pooling at the fissures between shrouds of synthetic layers. In this world, the mind is a composite, it is both body and architecture—twilight figures blend intermittently between depth and flatness, all the while existing within a liminal state of chiaroscuro shadow.

Around the Clock, the artist’s third solo presentation at the gallery, melts formals referents together into the iconic alloy of the artist’s images. Tethered to the familiar like an ominous déjà vu, Gagliardi transports us into a world seemingly ambivalent of our presence. As viewers, we are caught between the thresholds of seeing and being seen, unclear if we are invited into this act of total recall. Yet as viewers our voyeurism is implicated through the triangulation of the gaze— onto subjects, towards each other, and finally onto ourselves, as the artist employs us as equal actors into her foreboding tableaus.

Cinema, like painting, is psychological art. Action slides between stasis and movement; in the passive gesture of watching, time slows down into frozen moments between gazes. These works enact a melodrama in slow-motion, stretched outside of a celluloid chronology. Through a process manipulating printed PVC plastic, Gagliardi translates her pictures from digital to physical. This action allows her images to float between rendering and painting, copy and original. In doing so the artist folds together nostalgia and memory into shimmering constructions built from mercury in a perpetual state of retrograde. By assembling these images as a series of psychological rooms, a palace of the subconscious is built. As either resort destination or formal purgatory, this place is seemingly isolated from the turning movement of the world. Even so, in the fantastical realms of the subconscious reality tends to slip through its sheen, uncannily familiar. All the while we are placed outside, looking in through windows.

--Alex Turgeon

1 Nolen, Jeannette L.. “mnemonic”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 18 Sep. 2019, https://www.britannica.com/topic/mnemonic. Accessed 5 August 2022.




Louisa Gagliardi (Born in 1989 in Switzerland; lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland) Her work has recently been shown at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva, Switzerland (2021); Antenna Space, Shanghai, China (2020); McNamara Art Projects, Hong Kong (2019); Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau (2018); Centre d’art de Neuchâtel CAN, Neuchâtel (2018); Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St. Gallen (2018); MOSTYN, Llandudno, Wales, UK (2018); Openforum, Berlin (2018); Plymouth Rock, Zurich (2018); the Louisiana, Humlebæk (2017); Pilar Corrias, London (2017); rodolphe janssen, Brussels (2017); The Cabin, LA (2016); Tomorrow Gallery, New York (2016); Instituto Svizzero, Rome, Italy (2016) and König Galerie, Berlin (2016). She was shortlisted for the Swiss Art Awards in 2018 and 2021. Gagliardi’s work was recently acquired by the Frac, Normandie, France and she just presented a new project for Unlimited at Art Basel this year.

Cornelia Baltes
Waggle Dance
08.09 > 22.10.2022

Waggle Dance, Cornelia Baltes’ first solo presentation at rodolphe janssen in Brussels, sees the space teeming with life, activating the gallery with large vividly pigmented paintings built from sprayed gradients, bold gestures and fine brushwork set within a space-wide wall painting.

Titled after a movement some bees enact to share information about the direction and distance of resources like nectar and water, Waggle Dance invites the viewer to enter a zone where Baltes playfully blurs the lines between figuration and abstraction in compositions that never quite settle into an unambiguous motif. We may recognise a shape as a peach or a bum, or perhaps a set of eyes. These forever undefined ‘characters’, as Baltes refers to her paintings, radiate joyfulness and humour.

The paintings are developed from brush-sketches that are themselves painted from the memory of observational sketching in botanical gardens. The super-saturated, rich palette - which in flowers functions to attract and direct bees - in combination with the wall painting extrapolated from foliage, casts the exhibition space as a garden, with the accompanying suggestion that perhaps the audience are the bees.

Typically accessible and generous, the exhibition is an invitation to see differently, taking quotidian subject matter and offering a strange sidelong glance. Like the bees communicating the presence of resources, Baltes’ Waggle Dance performatively gestures toward the multiplicity in painting and acknowledges the important role of the viewer buzzing around the space in completing the work with their own readings and associations.

Cornelia Baltes (Born in 1978, Mönchengladbach, Germany; lives and works in Berlin, Germany)

Cornelia Baltes graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art; London in 2011. She has exhibited in solo and group shows at Deichtorhallen Hamburg; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz; Museum Wiesbaden; Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff; Mostyn, Llandudno (Wales); Northern Gallery for Contemporary Arts, Sunderland (UK), ICA London, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Kunsthalle Nuremberg; Museum Folkwang (Essen), Museum Kunst Palast Dusseldorf among many others. Her work is included in collections such as the Government Art Collection, UK; Arts Council Collection, London, UK; V+A Collection, London, UK; UCL Collection, London, UK; Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, China; Private Sammlungen im In-und Ausland, Germany.