We’re delighted to announce the project by Ludovica Gioscia, the seventh invited artist in our IN HOUSE series of collaborations between the House of Sarah Baker and artists, illustrators and designers. IN HOUSE invites visual creatives to take over the brand's Instagram channel with their personal, bespoke responses to our fragrances.
Text written by IN HOUSE curator, Ken Pratt
LUDOVICA GIOSCIA'S IN HOUSE WORKS FOR SARAH BAKER
Ludovica Gioscia is an artist who has been primarily based in London for decades, with periods of undertaking projects in the USA and her native Italy. Hers is an eclectic practice that takes in sculpture, 2-D work, resistant media, and collage—among other media—often brought together in installations or becoming a meta-work where the end of one piece and the beginning of another is not obvious in the gestalt played out in a gallery space.
Like a number of artists of her generation, she found London a simpatico place to evolve her practice after completing both her initial and post-grad art education in the city. But, despite studying in the UK and having been an active participant in London’s artistic communities since the early Noughties, there remains something beautifully and quintessentially Italian about her work.
It first hits you when you walk in and are confronted by the raucous colour palettes and the articulation of disorientating graphic elements that immediately evoke that 80s rock band of Italian design Ettore Sottsass pulled together: Memphis. But, this is not design.
As you draw closer, it’s the use of materials and modes that reference Arte Povera. Materials of the everyday, the stuff that many might discard, are turned around and renewed in combination with new materials into things that take on fresh meaning or demand a rethink. But, this is not the work of a 1970s context, not concerned with “poor” materials in a linear political discourse or the Italian socioeconomic circumstances that preoccupied the original movement. They are more like an abstraction through which to view our contemporary challenges such as waste, sustainability and the attribution of value and notions of beauty, both in cultural and monetary terms. They are not a poster demanding action, but rather an exhortation to reflection.
There is even a whiff of the Electronic Baroque, embracing of Baroque obsessions with colour, the hyperbolic and a near obsession with how art can only live within factual, actual architectural spaces. While this movement, arising in the late 1970s, was mainly focused on music, in Ludovica’s case, this is more akin to Norman M.Klein’s notion in The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects (2004) that explores a history of “scripted spaces” and traces parallels between Baroque Churches and contemporary media landscapes.
Above: 'Follicle Symphony' (2023). VITRINE, Fitzrovia, London. Photo Jonathan Bassett.
With other Italian artists of her generation, technology and scientific innovation often play out more overtly—for example in their use of CGI—than in Ludovica’s work, where it is almost peripheral or hidden; in the tech used to make print elements almost secreted within the cacophony of things or in the use of new high-tech polymers to create sculptures that are not immediately obvious.
There is something deeply archaeological in how Ludovica positions her work, sifting through the layers of artistic movements that preceded her or emerged shoulder-to-shoulder with her generation. This is particularly relevant to her IN HOUSE project.
Ludovica Gioscia’s project for IN HOUSE builds on an existing body of work that she has evolved for some time—for example, the works shown in Los Angeles in 2017—in which she uses “readymade” forms of commercial cosmetic product packaging and bottling to create moulds in order to create a “positive” rendition of the original. In the earlier work, the artistic choices are limited in a self-disciplined way: what preexisting products to select; what to retain or remove in the final object produced from the cast; what relationships to create between cast objects; and what colour (if any) to apply. The resulting works have undeniably archaeological overtones; things that appear as delicate and treasured as if they were in the British Museum of the revered museums of her hometown of Rome, freed from ancient soil with patience using only a brush and then, for a second time, preserved for posterity.
The first time I saw these works, it immediately drew to mind David Macaulay’s 1979 spoof book with illustrations, Motel of the Mysteries. I first saw these images leafing through a dog-eared magazine in a doctor’s waiting room in Savannah, Georgia, when, in an unusual gesture of feel-good populism, National Geographic ran a feature on Macaulay and his book. The premise was very simple: in the year 4022, a fictional archaeologist excavates a typical 20th-century American roadside motel and draws some interesting archaeological conclusions. For example, the toilet seat is interpreted as a ceremonial necklace.
As a kid dragged around every ancient ruin from Ostia Antica to Great Zimbabwe by a father always frustrated that he never followed his youthful dream to become a Classicist or archaeologist, the illustrations and faux academic text in Motel of the Mysteries were deeply resonant with me, not least of all for their dry sense of humour. But, I suspect the reason the senior Editorial at National Geographic HQ even went there was because at the heart of Macaulay’s cynical-yet-gentle parody, there were serious questions about the discipline of archaeology and how it frames our distant past.
In her preceding body of work, and in new and different ways in her IN HOUSE project, Ludovica’s work engages directly with this bigger question about how we engage with our distant past—and by implication what that means for who we are today. It’s particularly there in the use of colour.
In discussing this with her, where the IN HOUSE project sits as a kind of adjunct to this preceding body of work, she spoke with passion about wanting to challenge the pervasive myth of the “white” of archaeological Classicism; that pared back pale marble or the whited-out Plaster of Paris casts found in so many museums. And, of course, we now know from enhanced scientific techniques Ancient Rome was not a place of gleaming white temples as played out in Las Vegas, nor was the Athene of the Parthenon a monochromatic goddess, but rather a garish one. Contrary to the visual language of swords-and-sandals pics filmed at Cinecitta’ starring Sophia Loren, the Ancient World couldn’t get enough of lurid Technicolor. Bizarre as it might seem today, ancient Romans actually painted over all that serious marble quarried from Carrara in bright, garish pigments to create more “lifelike” statues of deities.
There is something hugely resonant with contemporary conceptual art practices about this. To daub over the “rich” material of marble with bog standard vegetable pigments to create populist comic book versions of gods and goddesses feels more like it could be something dreamed up by Cattelan or Ontani than the Ancient Romans or Greeks. And, yet, we now factually know this was the case.
Above: 'On Tralfamadore Neurons Fire Forever' (2024). Photo Giorgio Benni.
Ludovica Gioscia’s work confronts such concepts head-on. But, if earlier works in her oeuvre first addressed this, the work for IN HOUSE takes considerations in a slightly different direction—for example, the vague notion of Modernism in its palette and decisions about representational form teetering on abstraction; painters such as Morandi. The IN HOUSE project has a more formalist feel, a sense of plotting out the possibilities in a disciplined way.
They begin with the almost “whited out”, head down a bejewelled route, but then also take in a place of notable colour that, in one case—perhaps because of the inclusion of faux pearls— feels more about the Baroque than the Classical.
For IN HOUSE, Ludovica Gioscia has created a seductively complex series of works, something that might not be obvious until one spends a little more time looking at it.
Before we consider anything else, we must consider empty space to even arrive at "classical white”. Following on from her previous artistic research, Ludovica has materialised an experience of the “empty spaces” within the packaging of Sarah Baker retail products and also the industrial packaging in which its signature caps are shipped to the studio.
For example, she has made moulds of the empty space within the brand’s signature presentation boxes that, in turn, have enabled her to create an actualised, material version of how we experience “unboxing”; the bottle sitting snugly within its laser-cut ecofoam as solid reality. But it is abstracted into something that is “other”, displaced from the familiar context of good retail design for a luxury product.
In the supposedly “purist” version, devoid of much colour, one can’t help think of the legends of Pompeii and Herculaneum and archaeologists deftly pouring plaster into preserved empty spaces in which human, animal or plant existence was eviscerated by the pyroclastic flows from Mount Vesuvius in the dramatic events of 79AD. Pompeii is literally burned into the collective consciousness of European culture. Here, the empty spaces become memento mori that, like those casts, are a snapshot of ancient real life frozen in time.
In another piece working with the empty space within the presentation box, Ludovica has used crystal and other glitzy stones and manufactured jewel-like materials used in high fashion and costume jewellery. These are not fixed to the surface. Rather, they have been placed into the mould at the point of casting so that they are literally held in situ by a specialised material that, though appearing like that Plaster of Paris beloved of 19th-century archaeologists and museum curators, is capable of “holding” them in place. The result evokes a reliquary in a cathedral, a half-preserved receptacle that might hold the bones or body part of a saint, gruesomely martyred, with special powers. It feels medieval; pre-Rennaissance.
And, in the third of this triptych (my term, not the artist’s), we suddenly have riotous blues and swathes of faux pearls in something Baroque and, frankly, something Baroque that feels more likely to have come from Venice than Ludovica’s Rome. Again, we are pulled back to the consideration of what we consider archaeological, but here it has a Postmodern edge, more a consideration of transhistoricism and how what preceded us is narrated as “the archaeological” or “historical” more than in merely the terms of our own era. It evokes how museums might have looked when Casanova was escaping from prison over the rooftops of Venice…
In other works made for IN HOUSE—working with the presentation packaging of the Scented Portfolio discovery set or the industrial packaging in which the caps are shipped that customers never see—things take a turn that feels more about architecture or design. The positive objects created from capturing negative space feel less like historical or archaeological objects and more like maquettes or samples one might encounter on a stand at a highly specialised industry fair. Abstracted and stripped of any immediately recognisable form they may have in a consumer context, they become building blocks of a fiercely modernist world, the design for a cladding Oscar Niemeyer might have intended for one of his buildings in Brasilia or a small detail, half hidden and a little neglected, adorning a wall in one of the remaining buildings of Rome’s 1960 Olympic Village in Flaminio.
There is definitely a serendipitous kinship with some of the earlier work of Rachel Whiteread—in how empty space is manipulated to enable something to materialise as an object where spectres of a past with very quiet voices imply but never shout out their histories. But, in the case of Luduvica Gioscia, the focus on notions of the Classical World are deeply autobiographical. A true Roman whose formative years were spent in the eternal city-as-open-air museum jostling with the energetic and vibrant energy arising from Italy’s post-WWII art scene that informed her generation, these become rather personal artefacts.
If any of this seems a little ponderous, it’s important to note that breezy light touch that is always present in Ludovica’s work. Yes, there is also humour here, sometimes as naughty and irreverent as the little guy in the La Linea animations. Thus, even in its most serious moments, this is work that is capable of saying "Ciao, ragazzi!" without apologising or diminishing the seriousness at its core.
https://www.ludovicagioscia.com/
Ludovica Gioscia's project for IN HOUSE was photographed by Ben Reeves.
