Johannes Girardoni / La Biennale di Venezia
Karlyn de Jongh & Sarah Gold

Among Girardoni’s recent works are site-specific sculp­tures and instal­la­tions that blur the bound­ary between the dis­ci­plines of archi­tec­ture and sculp­ture, re-orchestrate the “mate­ri­als” of light and sound, and manip­u­late pres­ence and rep­re­sen­ta­tion. After spend­ing time in West Africa on a research expe­di­tion with archi­tects and sci­en­tists three years ago, Girardoni’s focus shifted into a crit­i­cal inquiry of con­tem­po­rary cul­ture. The core of this dis­course takes place at the inter­sec­tion of dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion and ana­log mate­r­ial. The works draw atten­tion to how our under­stand­ing of real­ity in the dig­i­tal age increas­ingly appears at the inter­face of real and vir­tual con­tent. Girardoni’s new over-painted, photo-based works titled Exposed Icons ques­tion the integrity of the pho­to­graph as a car­rier of archived infor­ma­tion by decon­struct­ing imagery of adver­tis­ing bill­boards and using both dig­i­tal pig­ment and mate­r­ial paint, to com­press the vir­tual infor­ma­tion of the pho­to­graph and the phys­i­cal struc­ture of the paint into a sin­gle pic­to­r­ial architecture.