Archaic and natural or maybe artificial and urban landscapes, viewpoints from multiple views. They are real places or they are places of memory: this is a questioning curiosity. A deceptive view, a three-dimensional trompe-l’œil: the material conceals a more exquisite portrait, if one knows how to look carefully, if one knows how to search deeply.

Eva Jospin, Stratification (Vedute) series 2023, acrylic cement and pigments, 170 x 125 cm, photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy the Artist and Galleria Continua

The art of optical illusion is just a media gimmick for Eva Jospin – Parisian artist born in 1975 – in whose plastic art past, present and future are read in a landscape key. A natural landscape influenced by man, with its artifices, its traditions to be handed down, its traces and ruins, rising and falling. The French artist is fascinated by the physical and intellectual co-presence that a view, seemingly shifted by the eye, can reveal: woods, caves, cliffs, forests, are places that penetrate the body and the mind. In them, it is possible to observe how the passage of time has changed the natural setting, the erosion of rocks, the climbing of vegetation, the violence of man. Consequently, these aspects emphasise the life of humanity, its history, its myths, its  unconscious, its fears. Jospin indicates a possible way for a mental, imaginative and perhaps distancing journey from the other, to lose oneself and find oneself again, a relational or futuristic journey. And then the imaginary projection becomes a material illusion. The woody woods, with their branches and roots, are sculptures in honeycomb cardboard; plaster and cement replace the ancient rock; architectural designs are made with silk threads. Eva acts by subtraction and addition of matter with meticulous work that is free and potentially expressive. In some aspects there is also creative reuse through the duality of her favourite elements: an ecological consciousness that transcends contemporary issues.

Eva Jospin, Galleria 2023, silk thread embroidery on silk canvas and cardboard frame, 160 x 240 cm unframed, 176 x 256 cm with frame, photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy the Artist and Galleria Continua

Jospin’s natural and symbolic universe is hosted for the first time in the historical venue of Galleria Continua in San Gimignano. In one of the three locations in the hill town of Siena, in Arco dei Becci, the exhibition is called (in fact) Vedute and includes nine works created for the occasion. La Forêt is a raw and pure cardboard sculpture, without colors, scenic though carefully cut out. In it, vegetation is the protagonist in the spotlight, but the sensations and suggestions are there in the artificial meanders. Next to it, the work Galleria distresses on the wall in chromatic contrast and material contiguity: the colored and embroidered silk on the canvas is enclosed like a painting by a cardboard frame. The image Eva presents has clear connections to periods and artistic influences that are a source of inspiration and experience for her. The design thus stitched is the result of research and graphic studies that are very dear to her because they imply a current creation, past references and future projects. Plaster and cement casts give life to the triptych Stratificazioni, in which the ineluctable time piles up and punctures the greyish matter.

Eva Jospin, Forêt 2023, cardboard and wood, 170 x 240 x 36 cm, photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy the Artist and Galleria Continua

With her art, Eva Jospin narrates the fragility of nature, the unstable contamination of man, the sensitivity of both interconnecting in fantastic views. The material ambiguity of her works generates real and illusory suggestions, deceiving the eye without changing the perception of what essentially is.

Info:

Eva Jospin. Vedute
27/05 – 10/09 2023
Galleria Continua
Arco dei Becci 1, San Gimignano (SI)

Massimiliano Bastardo

Art Curator and Art Advisor, graduated in Visual Arts and Cultural Mediation, with Master in Curatorial Practices, born in 1995, lives in Naples. He collaborates with Galleries and Independent Spaces, his research is mainly focused on Emerging Painting, with a careful and inclined gaze also on other forms of aesthetic language.