Novalis Art Design is pleased to present EROSIVA, Costanza Gastaldi’s solo show curated by Angelica Moschin, showing her newest series of photographs exploring female intimacy and illness. The exhibition is kindly supported by the Italian Cultural Institute in Hong Kong. The artist will be present at the opening reception.

The exhibition presents for the first time a comparison between the widely exhibited and internationally acclaimed LOTO NERO, and her newest series EROSIVA. The technique used in both series is the extremely rare and fascinating héliogravure au grain, an ancient printing process dating back to the 19th century that allows a photographic image to be etched in low relief through various chemical processes on a copperplate. This very fine-grained technique can capture both the subtle nuances of greys and the depths of blacks from the original plate. This gives the prints a precious tactile quality, prolonging and amplifying the creative gesture through its manual nature and making it almost permanent over time.

The 80 large-format black-and-white landscape shots of LOTO NERO were conceived during the artist's journey to Huangshan in eastern China. LOTO NERO represents pure wandering, in the dual sense of both physical roaming and the agonizing uncertainty of the mind or spirit. It is an emotional and sentimental journey through physical obstacles, that faintly echo the psychological ones awaiting the protagonist, an emblem of constant soul searching, and an invitation to believe in imminent rebirth.

EROSIVA, on the other hand, is an ode to what is left inside us when everything collapses. It is an invitation to ponder on a topic that, in our view, has not yet been thoroughly addressed: the elusive relationship between female intimacy and illness. EROSIVA is from the contraction of two Italian words, eros and corrosiva (corrosive). It is a series of 17 photographs that captures the bitter dissonance between how a woman perceives herself during the various stages of healing— fully erotic, vibrant, and alive —and how others see her, as someone irreversibly marked by misfortune, devoid of desire, and separated from the rest of the world. Shot after shot, the project portrays the image of a dignified woman, at once strong and fragile, who appears and disappears behind a thick, almost shroud-like veil, only to emerge stronger than before. The contours of her silhouette, initially contained by a delicate tension that could break at any moment, weakly surface from the depths of a dimly lit, almost timeless room. They gradually become more vivid, lively, and enriched by an outlined life, to the rhythm of experience inexorably approaching form.

EROSIVA is a story of reconciliation, of a slow and painful inner excavation to make peace with oneself, one’s history, and one’s body despite everything and everyone. Hungry for beauty, the artist’s eye strives to create works as aesthetically captivating as they are rich in material research which is reminiscent of ancient techniques of photographic surface manipulation and close to the realm of pictorialism. In a digital age where everything is consumed at a much faster pace from the past, what is readmitted in Gastaldi’s work is one of the most poignant meditations on what matters most: what is real, la réalité rugueuse, that raw quality that inevitably characterizes the experience of beauty. In the end, at the height of virtual dematerialization, knowing how to navigate between a disembodied world and the desperate flesh of the world is everything.