UNTITLED | LISA LURATI

The practice of Lisa Lurati (Lugano, 1989) is closely connected to the animal and natural world. Personal life choices have led her to live in various European countries and South America, allowing her to receive a pluralistic and multicultural education, with photography as her starting point.

A gaze is the element that captures attention in the artwork Untitled (2023), a magnificent large-scale cyanotype created on a linen canvas. Specifically, the gaze belongs to Tito, a coati that Lurati met during her residency in the Colombian Amazon.
Before being rescued by a couple and taken in as a pet, Tito was a victim of abuse inflicted by his previous owner.
In Lurati’s work, he is depicted immersed in an imaginary landscape, full of wild plants and unknown birds: an ideal environment created not only for him but for all creatures in this world that deserve more respect and freedom.

The coati’s gaze is attentive and inquisitorial, almost seeming to want to examine, interrogate those who are observing him, asking, “What are you doing? What are you humans doing to the natural world?”
Untitled is a piece that Lurati dedicated to Tito, but more generally, it is intended as a tribute to the liberation of the animal world, through the representation of an idyllic situation that symbolizes freedom.

The choice of cyanotype is a deliberate reference to the origins of photographic printing and its relationship with the natural world, when in the 1800s it was used for botanical documentation.
In the process of creating this artwork, the artist’s hybrid approach emerges: Lurati, in fact, does not print from a photograph, but from a painting. A unique method derived from an in-depth study of the structure of the photographic negative, its whites and blacks, its dense areas alternating with transparencies.
The result is a perfect harmony between painting and photography, between imagination and reality, between dated techniques and new multidisciplinary combinations.

Lisa Lurati
Untitled, 2023
Cyanotype on linen, 350 x 500 cm
Installation view at “Arcadia,” Bally Foundation, Lugano, curated by Vittoria Matarrese, May 29, 2024 – January 12, 2025. Photo: Andrea Rossetti.

13/07/24