ART PARIS FAIR, 2022, Paris.
Article sur ACUMEN MAGAZINE
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Among its virtuoso practitioners, we have set our sights on an artist from Turin, born in 1993 and living for ten years in Paris: Costanza Gastaldi. Using the ancient technique of heliogravure (“drawing by the sun” at the origin of the invention of photography) for its plastic qualities and, in particular, the subtlety of the rendering of the shades of gray or the depth, almost tactile, of the blacks, she multiplies tenfold the graphic possibilities by imperceptibly metamorphosing (by digital retouching) the image. Cultivating the formal ambiguity between photography and drawing, her landscapes instill a feeling of strangeness, even unreality.
Retouching, shading, with a stylus, on a screen, each piece of the engraved image, she recreates another one, dreamlike, fantasized. Thus, her magical mountains, the mythical Huang Mountains piercing the sky in eastern China (climbed by the photographer with 18 kg of equipment on her back during the sacred hours before dawn in 2018), or her miniature landscapes in tondo, as if seen through a door peephole or a keyhole, from her irresistible series entitled Landscape Voyeurism.
