Vistamarestudio is pleased to present Dust in the Shadows, an exhibition by the Portuguese artist Joana Escoval. The show features a series of new works and marks the artist’s first exhibition in Milan.
The title of the exhibition is inspired by an episode in H. G. Wells’s novel, In the Days of the Comet, in which a comet, passing near the Earth, brings about a “great change” in human spirits.
Escoval’s show echoes this transformation, the slow imperceptible changes perpetually being wrought by the cosmic energy, which creates nothing and destroys nothing but alters everything.
At the heart of this artist’s work lies our relationship with the world we inhabit and the fact that, as individuals, we are ontologically interconnected with the world in its primordial state. Her sculptures suggest natural, primordial forms which crystalize, fused and moulded by the artist herself in alchemy’s symbolic materials – gold and silver –, silently echoing events celestial, terrestrial and timeless. The works bend and reshape themselves under their own gentle weight, and they react, vibrating, to their specific ambient conditions, like the jagged landscape of a lightning-filled sky, or moonscapes in which any human presence is barely perceptible.
In Escoval’s sculptures, the ideal forms of the noblest of metals are combined with the primeval shapes of volcanic rocks, revealing an endless chain of connections uniting all states of matter, and the essence of the act of aesthetic creation in which the artist is both author – faber – and receptor, transforming and transfiguring the matter that surrounds her.
Joana Escoval was born in 1982 in Lisbon. In 2020 she will be the subject of a solo exhibition at Museu Coleção Berardo, in Lisbon. A selection of exhibitions and projects include: CIAJG, Guimarães (2019); S.M.A.K. Gent, Belgium (2019); Tenderpixel, London (2019); Fiorucci Art Trust, London (2018); La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2017), Volcano Extravaganza, Stromboli (2016); Kunsthalle Lissabon and Kunsthalle Tropical, Iceland (2016); La Criée Centre for Contemporary Art, Rennes (2016); MAAT, Lisbon (2015); Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, Paris (2015); Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2014). She won the BES Revelação Prize in 2012 (Serralves Museum) and was nominated for the EDP Foundation New Artists Prize in 2015, in Portugal.