The Beauty of the Lesser Things:
A short essay on Elisa Sighicelli
Lorenzo Fusi
Elisa Sighicelli (Italian, b. 1968) is an artist whose lens-based practice is primarily concerned with the space-defining sculptural qualities of light. She uses and challenges photography, persistently interrogating the medium’s limits and experimenting with its possibilities. Sighicelli is not interested in conveying a clear narrative through her work and in photographic documentation, favoring embodiment over interpretation. Her investigations in the realm of photography mostly dwell on the phenomenology of viewing and, arguably, her work only materializes through the physical encounter with the viewer. Sighicelli is also interested in the interplay between fiction and reality, and in exploring the relations connecting that which is in the picture to that which lives outside the frame. Increasingly, the artist is experimenting with different materials and working three-dimensionally, ultimately challenging the flatness of traditional photography.
A recurrent interest in Sighicelli’s practice is exploring the correlations that exist between light, space and perception. She is also concerned with the deconstruction of visual conventions and hierarchies. She often takes unusual standpoints in her work, so that which generally goes unnoticed can be revealed in all its potency and poetry. Sighicelli’s approach and methodology are always context- or site-responsive. For each exhibition, she develops projects that appear radically different from one another, and yet it is easy to follow her artistic trajectory. When museums or other cultural institutions invite Sighicelli to produce work in response to their collections, for instance, she is generally to be found in their storage as opposed to the main galleries, looking out for the unseen, the forgotten or the understated. Through these incursions and investigations, Sighicelli always focuses her attention on minor details, discreetly recording the secret life of objects that quietly shy away from or resist the limelight. In mining these hidden stories, Sighicelli subverts the order of things: that which is considered important becomes minor, and the secondary or seemingly irrelevant is foregrounded.
There is another aspect in Sighicelli’s practice that must be taken into consideration. By literally bringing light into dark spaces, often using flashlights or light spots, Sighicelli captures unexpected associations between objects that could not be read or interpreted otherwise. Conversely, by making her way through veils, layers and opacity, she finds delight where it is least expected, at the periphery of the gaze. Her practice can be best described as a lyrical tribute to the beauty of the lesser things, or a phenomenological monument celebrating that which is conventionally hidden or marginalized.
Of the many ideas we discussed when Sighicelli was invited to exhibit new work at Galeria Leme in São Paulo, several related to modernist architecture, a distinctive and almost paradigmatic feature of Brazilian culture. Given Sighicelli’s interest in the transformative power of light, and her strategic positioning of the camera in the magical space at the crossroad between sensorial fiction and photographic representation, the realm of architecture appeared to be the perfect playground for attempting novel readings of the country’s modernist heritage from an unusual and unfamiliar perspective. The iconic Edifício Copan in São Paulo was among the buildings I mentioned to Sighicelli as a possible case study or subject matter. Specifically, I suggested working with the protective net that prevents the loose tesserae of the outdoor mosaics of the buildings from falling on passersby. I thought this protective layer would allow the artist to get some perspectival distance. This strategy appealed to Sighicelli, who often pierces through different layers, or visual planes, to unveil the unseen and reveal the overlooked.
The Copan in downtown São Paolo is everything but “lesser” or inconspicuous. This impressive building, built between 1957 and 1966, perfectly encapsulates the ambitions and vision of high Modernism, with its sinuously curved façade designed by Oscar Niemeyer for Companhia Pan-Americana de Hotéis e Turismo (from which the acronym “Co-Pan” originates). It also epitomizes the recent cultural and artistic renaissance of the city, thanks to cultural initiatives such as Pivô Arte e Pesquisa, based in the Copan, and the presence of many artists in the area. Even in a sprawling metropolis such as São Paulo, the Copan is hardly unnoticeable. With its almost 120,0000 square meters of built area and 1,160 apartments, the Copan is a city on its own, a microcosm with its own postal code, as if it were a separate satellite city. Sighicelli’s task, therefore, was not to document the patent intriguing beauty of this building and its people—an exercise that many artists before her have attempted—but to direct our gaze and attention differently.
Naturally, for any foreign artist visiting Brazil, even for Elisa Sighicelli, whose family has profound links with Brazil (her mother still lives there), tackling such an evocative and characterizing architecture is a dangerous exercise. The risk of indulging in tropes associated with cultural tourism and stereotyping is high. Sighicelli has bypassed this risk by flipping the viewpoint, focusing not on the building itself, but on what can be seen from the Copan through the turquoise protective net that, like a shroud, shelters its commanding brutalist monumentality.
Visually, the protective net works like a one-way system, allowing people to see out from the inside, but acting almost as a barrier for those who look from the outside in. Over the years, sections of the net have torn, and its lacerated grid occasionally gives way to an open view. As in The Matrix, the grid of the net is constellated by small digital glitches that allow residents to see through and beyond its geometrical pattern. As I was writing these notes, it occurred to me that the Copan’s protective net, in photographic terms, operates like a visual gateway, allowing us to enter another world or dimension, as happens in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. It is a magical device through which the viewer can see the world differently, and Sighicelli takes full advantage of its optical powers, with a surprisingly painterly effect.
The first estranging slippage that the net creates is epistemic, shifting our attention from the syntagma “stereotypical” (a term originally associated with ideas of order and composition) to “archetypical” and “prototypical,” two terms that perfectly fit the intentions of the developers behind the construction of the Copan: to create a new architectural template in urban design and, in a sense, to attempt a social experiment. The Copan embodies the grandiosity and ambitions of the modernist project, similar to Le Corbusier’s 1930 Ville Radieuse (“Radiant City”), but expresses them in a single architecture that is distinctively South American and universal at the same time.
The second shift that occurs is sensorial. Because of the net covering, the hard concrete surface of the Copan softens and recedes, partially hidden by the net’s synthetic skin, which changes the building’s color while also concealing its features and contours. The turquoise mesh not only conceals but also highlights the architecture of the Copan that, as a result, seems to be hiding in plain sight. The color of the net is digitally manipulated in several works in this exhibition. When the artist converts the images into their negative, for instance, the blue of the net becomes pink, making it obvious that the Copan (when seen against São Paulo’s skyline) is like “the pink elephant in the room,” a building that everyone sees even if it pretends not to be there, dissimulating its presence behind its protective system.
Instead of directly confronting the building’s imposing silhouette, Sighicelli astutely positions her camera in the interspace between the façade of the building and the protective membrane that envelops it. This protective device is almost an admission of the building’s own vincibility and vulnerability. The obsolescence of the construction materials stands as a powerful metaphor, questioning the legacy of the modernist dream and its underpinning ideologies. Like a contemporary Colossus of Rhodes, the Copan manifests both its strength and its weakness, appearing all too human. And through the holes in its clothing (the net), the building cannot but look back at us in earnest honesty.
Over the years, Sighicelli has tested the limits of photography by printing on the most varied materials and has challenged conventional methods of display. Her interest in space and architecture is not limited to what is in the picture, but also manifests in the way she presents her work to the viewer. In fact, her images often become three-dimensional objects that physically inhabit the exhibition space. Increasingly, she is operating in the realm of sculpture and installation art. For her first exhibition at Galeria Leme, Sighicelli moves away from the concrete walls of the gallery and showcases her new photographs using a display system composed of sculptural forms that are modular, yet distinctively unique in each configuration. These are inspired by the architectural grid of the gallery’s wall paneling, but also consider the grid of the Copan’s protective net, captured by her photos, as well as the urban grid and cellular structure of the many architectures of São Paulo. This complex system of cross-references reinforces the relationship between Sighicelli’s images and the context in which they were created. Similarly, the concrete becomes a unifying element for the project, present in the gallery space, across the entire city of São Paulo and in the building that has inspired the artworks.
The modularity of the presentation and the strong presence of raw construction materials in the gallery (as well as in the photographs) cool down the effect of many of Sighicelli’s painterly images. Thanks to the artist’s clever cropping and digital manipulations, the world that one sees from and through the Copan is magical and different, and the multiplicity of standpoints that the artist presents in the works is reflected in the display system, which allows for multiple views and entrature (“conceptual entry points”). Many of the large photographs are printed on fabric, lined on the back with textiles in solid colors, purposely created by the artist to match the chromatic effects of the photographs. Smaller photographs are printed on paper to emphasize the quality and resolution of the image. Overall, what emerges from this new installation by Sighicelli is an urban symphony of shapes, structures and colors that captures some of the essential features of the city without detailing a single or dominant narrative.
Digital and analog at once, this new body of work by Sighicelli is almost retro-futuristic in the way it ambiguously positions photography at the intersection of different disciplines, while challenging its language and conventions. The exhibition also asks us to think about time differently. Suspended, almost timeless, Sighicelli’s new installation at Galeria Leme operates like a time capsule. It is “a spaceship / That we try to drive / Doesn’t have time or forgiveness / Doesn’t have a time to arrive.”
From “Aquarela” by Vinicius De Moares and Antonio Pecci Filho Toquinho © Universal Music Publishing Group.
