Caterina Rossato

Caterina Rossato’s artistic investigation is inhabited by a certain phenomenological obsession for photographs that are only captured by the eyes, that exists and persists beyond scopic vision, beyond pure perception, in our mind. Her analogical and digital compositions aim at bringing to life these immaterial images by means of a sort of composite vision.

This particular process of creation is at the basis of works such as Esercizio n.8/Greetings (2008). The artist collects old postcards, meticulously organised according to shape and colour, and literally cuts them into orographic profiles, topographic details, natural and anthropic entities, such as mountains, valleys, houses, monuments, roads. Cut outs are then assembled according to a strict aesthetic and chromatic logic and subsequently distributed and arranged along a scale of different perspective levels.

The material and tangible result is a collage of pictures, a view almost in the style of Piranesi, a landscape that can be defined as virtual in Bergsonian terms, rich in memories and representations that blur into each other. An imaginary geography, set against a plausible horizon but deprived of any relationship between time and space, despite being the product of multiple details taken from reality. Postcards function as forms of allomnesia, dejà vu, faux souvenirs. Souvenirs, mnémophile’s memory-objects, fetish objects meant to trigger memory, or, in other words: greeting cards.

Caterina Rossato’s works often involve the observer by means of an “activating” sight, triggered by inferences, interferences, identifications, and estrangement effects. Thus, in a similar way, the visitor is asked to decipher the white and disturbing entity – cloud or fog – that crosses the fixed landscape in the video White/Studio n. 1 (2016).

Caterina Rossato’s work is characterised by a rigorous method balanced between variation and repetition, strongly influenced by many years of piano and music practice.