Constanza Piaggio
Sharp Memories

Constanza Piaggio - Sharp Memories

These works by the Argentinian-born Paris-based contemporary artist Constanza Piaggio belongs to an evolving series, Sharp Memories, which began in 2019. Piaggio is an interdisciplinary new media artist who specializes in photography and video with the intent to reflect on art theory as it intersects with society.

The Sharp Memories series continues a thread of photo-interventions that began with a related plastic and visual study, Mental Meteorites, a body of work which exhibited at the gallery in 2015. While both bodies of work draw from the Artist’s personal archive of images, they diverge in strategy and focus. Mental Meteorites, a photo series with video component (Rock-Paper-Guillotine), made use of additive processes and integration that leaned on material to collage-based construction to collapse art-history theory and contemplate the human urge to record memory visually. Sharp Memories employs reductive processes to study the nature of the human mark in time. The Artist still relies on art theory frameworks and uses vacillating focus and destruction.

In Sharp Memories Constanza Piaggio tears directly into the photographic paper. Straight photographic shots soften and become analogical as the artist reveals the physical quality of the media itself. The illusion of surface disrupted is symbolic for the relationship between human actions and the natural world (we seem intent to destroy). In Constanza Piaggio’s Sharp Memories “the photographic image, natural elements, and fragments of artworks are combined and repeated thus pointing out the relationship between human actions, history and nature.” The sub-straight of our visual plane being shifted or “damaged” before our eyes becomes metaphor whereby Piaggio’s marks recognize and prove human activity as the first cause of the transformation of the Earth in our Anthropocene era.

Constanza Piaggio - Sharp Memories

Cut #17, 2019 | 30 x 45 cm (11.8 x 17.7 in.) c-print | unique | $800
Cut #2, 2019 | 18 x 27 cm ( 7 x 10.6 in.) c-print | unique | $600