Baert Gallery is pleased to announce Francesca Gabbiani's second exhibition with the gallery on view from April 6 to May 11, 2024.

In Francesca Gabbiani’s intricately hand-cut paper collages, the cactus serves as a metaphor for resilience, endurance, and adaptation in an age of impending ecological challenges. Her carefully constructed works confront the beauty and terror of destruction reflecting the increasingly arid and life altering conditions of a changing climate in Southern California, where she now lives and works.

The protracted process of carving thorny spines and overlaying them to create depth and shadow extends beyond the experimental framework of stick-and-paste without compromising spontaneity. In this sense, Gabbiani is absorbed in layers of time, mirroring the cacti’s own slow growth and long lifespan to underscore a humanitarian need to carry forward the vast memories ingrained within the natural world.

The addition of salt to Gabbiani’s considered application of acrylic, watercolour and gouache paints makes the very act of depicting her desert flora a brutal one, gesturing towards the intensity of survival in contemporary life where water seems more precious every day. Her scenes are entirely unpeopled yet there’s a sense that these are, indeed, portraits. In an ongoing series of paintings titled ‘The Survivors’, cactus paddles begin to take the form of faces crowding towards the centre of the frame, coarse stems bowed in quiet communion. The compositional treatment of these forms, at once bodily and architectural, renders them solitary relics against looming sinister skies. A degenerative world in which nature and urbanisation collide in their innately anarchic states.

The artist’s thermal, Lynchian-washed landscapes, as in ‘Pink pink pink pink... Pink moon’ are hauntingly beautiful yet surreally desolate, indicating a broader preoccupation with dystopian themes of environmental degradation and societal collapse. All the while, her pieces seem at the same time to hold a sense of quiet beauty, as if there will always be some sort of beauty that survives. Drawing inspiration from literary figures like Donna Haraway and Octavia Butler as well as the westerns of Sam Peckinpah, Gabbiani's work delves into the eerie intersection of science fiction and societal critique, inviting viewers to confront the complexities of our modern world and the implications of our collective choices.