NADIA GALBIATI
The places that Nadia Galbiati creates seem familiar in some way. They belong to the everyday life of city dwellers, using the spatial dimensions that are typical of contemporary urban planning. Here and there, you even recognize some of the sources of inspiration: for example, Bocconi University, the Solaria Tower in Porta Nuova, the Zurich building in the Maciacchhini area of Milan, but also, more generally, architecture designed by Richard Meier, Terragni and other great names in architectural history. In the work of Galbiati, architectural design is investigated as a linguistic code. It is the artist herself who offers us the key to the explanation of her work: “I use sculpture to produce a place for reflection”, she writes in a presentation text of her research. Nadia’s works – be they large installations or smaller wall works – are just that: places for reflection. These are objects that invite us to reconsider our relationship with the space that surrounds us, in particular with the artificial one that we find in the contemporary urban fabric. Through investigation of key elements that these spaces reflect and identify, considering angles, the symbols that best represent the third dimension, thereby making tangible and visible that which in fact isn’t. Galbiati uses angles as a means to demonstrate the importanza of the material of empty space, with view points like those of the Russian Constructivists – Tatlin with his Controrilievi, the polymaterial angular constructions between space-time-movement – and between the masters of the Bauhaus, whose study of the expressive, practical and symbolic potentialities of the square, is well recognized – but that also finds comfort in studies in prospective and the hypothesis of the use of Euclidean geometry in art by Piero della Francesca and Leon Battista Alberti.
Nadia Galbiati, however, does not start from an abstract concept, and doesn’t base her research on hypotheses and theoretical calculations; on the contrary, she observes, analyzes, and photographs reality that surrounds her, comparing everyday living spaces, thereby bringing them to the level of here-and-now and making them current and present. Nadia walks through the urban four sided areas – the geometric shape that we most associate with the urban context, especially that of Milan – and she observes the places that surround it and their relationships with the architectural system that defines its identity, perceives its boundaries, the spatio-temporal dimension, analyzing the linguistic codes. The large installation Coefficient space, for example, was created by observing the architectural body of Milan’s Bocconi University, whose sculptural constuction is ideal for analyzing the relationship between the plastic mass of the building, its empty and its full spaces, and the surrounding urban spaces. The relationship between architectual fullnessand its surrounding emptinessmanifests Space, making it tangible, rendering it material. The work is therefore a synthesis of a real place and its transformation into an object capable of relocating (and redefining) the artificial space of the exhibition site. Nadia Galbiati’s works are transformed by and shaped on the room they inhabit, this becoming a close relationship that leads to a mutual mutation: one of the mutation of the work that adapts to its host environment and the exhibition environment that becomes different due to the presence of the work. It is a similar approach to that of other artists such as Sol LeWitt.
Galbiati’s works originate in a real place and are destined for another real place, which as objects of art they will inhabit in the future, these are not places they have been planned for but to which they will adapt, modifying themselves and finding new reasons to justify their presence in new spatial relationships, places in which they are, from time to time, destined. They draw their expressive force precisely from their identity of form in space, in their being sculpture, painting and architecture, all together. Architecture becomes shape, symbol, and artistic element, an object that is both sculptural and graphic, that moves without boundaries between the two dimensional space of drawings and the three dimensional space of plastic models.
The positive and the negative, the fullness and the emptiness, the regularity of a square figure and the dynamism of a diagonal, the solidity of a geometric structure and the instability of precarious equilibria that seem to defy the laws of gravity, are all the formal elements with which Nadia conducts her own story. This is always poised between the tangibility of reality and the transcendence of perception, as in the play of images reflected by mirrors inserted in installations, so that space and elements multiply, revealing the complexity of our perceptual mechanisms.
And to relate her story, her study in spatial experience and its architectural codes, Nadia Galbiati chose long ago to use Iron, her material of choice. The artist uses iron as a sheet to be drawn on using clamps, a material used for constructing her structures, and as a reflecting surface. With this metal that she expertly transforms, Nadia builds geometric shapes that are extremely evocative, that retain an unexpected lightness and a very personal poetry, even in their severe regularity: works that transform our cities architecture into something timeless, absolute and universal, offering the viewer something important, a new perceptual and aesthetic experience.
Gianfranco Ferlisi
