Melike Kara, Talisa Lallai and Lindsay Lawson at Studiolo

Artists: Melike Kara, Talisa Lallai and Lindsay Lawson

Curated by: Maria Chiara Valacchi

Venue: Studiolo, Milan, Italy

Date: August 6 – 27, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Studiolo, Milan

Studiolo is glad to present the artists Melike Kara, Talisa Lallai and Lindsay Lawson’s group-show, curated by Maria Chiara Valacchi. On this occasion there will be shown only unreleased works which will reveal to the observer a concatenation of stylistic languages, including painting, sculpture, photography and installation. The artists, got together to ri-elaborate enigmatic shapes and to recover extra-ordinary subjects hidden to a hasty gaze, work for the first time on a shared project.

Melike Kara breaks the whiteness of the gallery with a huge acrylic and oil pastels site-specific wall painting, where long-limbs bodies appropriate of the two-dimensional surface thanks to the use of different joints in complex anatomical shapes. Mouths on undefined faces and filiform excrescences, similar to long tongues or snakes, join together as a carnal fil rouge, resulting in free and uninterrupted physiognomies forced into the perimeter identified by themselves and by the colour. The expressionist painting, made of quivering brush strokes and a primitive drawing by approximate nature, intentionally leaves the scene outstanding between an everlasting conflict between the manifest form and its dissolution, and the statement of a content and its free interpretation.

Talisa Lallai creates a corner with a more intimate atmosphere; “a rose is a rose”, taken from the poem Sacred Emily written by Gertrude Stein, is the incipit of the work and also the conceptual matrix on which the law regulating the identity of things, dear to the artist’s poetics, is based. Four scans of a 70’s floral guide take back the observer to a way of illustrating unaltered since then, only reelaborated in its size and support layouts and chosen by the predominant colour of each image. The weave and colour flaws are traces of a given point in history when the re-production was strictly linked to the alchemical development process and are the starting point to bestow new values. The work shows the interest of the artist towards new processes of change which, in the last few years, have modified the way of making photography and the dichotomy between the creative moment and its reinterpretation.

The Linsday Lawson’s multiform stylistic practice explores the correlation between unknown and even unreal objects and the emotions they can arouse. ‘The Smiling Rock’, an agate geode which reveals in its section a smiling face, on sale on line at $1.000,000, is for her a pretex to examine the connection between man and web and also a premise of a series of films and animations. For this show, Lawson creates two different works: a faux black meteorite, about a metre in diametre, made of polyurethane foam, showing on its surface two light circular depressions showing human features and a digital print extracted from some 3D models created for a recent video work leading back to a virtual nocturnal still-life scene. Lindsay Lawson structures an ephemeral world populated by unexpected objects and misleading affinities, linked to her personal life and to the recycling of various kind of materials.