MILAN – 22 May 2019  – Sofia Cacciapaglia is pleased to announce her exhibition Locus Amoenus, on view at Giardino di Carta through the autumn. In this new body of work, Cacciapaglia expands upon her existing cardboard series to create the most magnanimous undertaking of her career to date. Burgeoning on the salient themes and motifs of her paintings, Locus Amoenus marks her first undertaking in installation art.

Cacciapaglia has affixed to each wall discarded cardboard of varying shapes and sizes, which expand across all 4 walls of a 100 square meter room. Corporeally and optically enveloping, the viewer finds themselves briefly immersed in the mind of the artist, as the space traditionally serves as Cacciapaglia’s studio.  Stretching 5 meters up at its highest points, a symphony of flora and celestial planes traverse nearly every surface of the studio, with colors ranging from graceful pastels to dynamic and vibrant blues and greens.

As each piece of cardboard is adhered to the concrete walls using industrial size nails, the materials utilized call back to the practices of the artists of the Arte Povera movement – elevating the status of everyday materials to that of a work of art. Reviving the practices of fresco painters of the Italian Renaissance, Cacciapaglia broadens the boundaries of the picture plane, yet remains ever faithful to the ethereal nature of her distinctive aesthetic expression. The materiality of the Locus Amoenus is wholly contemporary, yet its painterly and expressionistic brush strokes simultaneously pronounce a nuanced, classical aesthetic. The installation is both an ode to and a subversion of some of the hallmarks of Italian art. A chromatic and botanical odyssey, the exhibition thus announces new pictorial horizons for the artist.