Working between Milan and Geneva, Viola Leddi’s works are explorations of girlhood and disillusionment. The artist takes inspiration from a vast range of sources: from history of art, to the very personal experience of anxiety and nightmares. The precise, nearly digital, finish of her figurative paintings is achieved through an extensive study into the processes of painting. Starting with hand drawn sketches on which she explores colour combinations with the help of digital tools, she continues on the canvas alternating between crisp lines and air brushed finishes.
Blurring the lines between hallucinations and memory, the paintings question the very capacity of visualising things through her eerie, yet meticulously constructed environments. Her canvases are filled with symbols, and she constructs her own choreography of signs which has become her unique visual language.
This month we sat down with Viola Leddi to discuss her creative process, tensions between the digital world and physical world, and her involvement in our upcoming exhibition, ‘Double Take’.
LVH: Your works explore the themes of memory, dreaming and nostalgia. How do you come up with your dream-like compositions?
VL: Recently, I've developed a strong interest in the concept of vision and visibility, encompassing their broader implications - historical, political, and scientific alike. My paintings employ collage techniques, empirical perspectives, and mixed viewpoints, all of which aim, to some degree, to challenge the very act of visualisation. I'm intrigued by the tension between visibility and intimacy, which is why I evoke references to self-narration, DIY practices, and relational dimensions in my paintings, positioning them as "resistant" practices against a backdrop of hyper-visibility and surveillance.
LVH: We will be including one of your works in our upcoming London exhibition, ‘Double Take’, which will explore the theme of perception in the contemporary age. Some might assume from a first glance that your works are digitally created when in reality you have meticulously employed airbrush techniques to create your compositions. Could you speak about this visual tension?
VL: I was introduced to the use of airbrushing by my mother, who is a graphic designer. Her early works in the 1980s were all done with an airbrush. The result of airbrushing is somewhat akin to digital painting, but unlike the latter, it's more "warm" because it's entirely handcrafted. I believe this difference is especially noticeable when viewing my works in person. The idea of mimicking the language of machines and digital art by hand fascinates me because it allows me to reflect on the processes of translation and reproduction of images, signs, and gestures. The translation and reproduction of images in my works, besides being a tool for understanding and studying images and their effects, in some cases, becomes a tribute and an act of care. For example, I love reproducing images from the personal archives of my friends, drawings, diary pages, and biographical elements in my works because I like the idea of leaving their mark on the canvas.
LVH: Before you begin a painting, you start with preliminary sketches and then transpose them onto Photoshop to experiment with colour palettes. Could you speak about why you choose to use technology in your preparatory process?
VL: I enjoy using software to visualise and design paintings; it's much faster and easier to experiment with various colour schemes and compositions. For the past few months, I've also been using an iPad. However, the moment of conceiving the basic design has always been, and still is, very intimate for me. Only on paper, strictly A5-sized, and with the use of a pencil, can I bring out my subjects. I must also have a specific inner disposition to draw, to be able to immerse myself in my own bubble for a while.
LVH: As a young artist, what are your thoughts on the recent rise of Artificial Intelligence and image generation tools? Do you see it as a potential threat to artistic creation? Or even a tool that can be used?
VL: I'm not currently using image generation tools in my work. I've only tried DALL-E a couple of times and was amazed by the results, especially considering the significant improvement they've undergone in just a few years. If we consider how machine learning works, simplifying, we know that these technologies generate new images by utilising learned patterns from the data they've been trained on, and combining these patterns to create an image that is coherent with a given prompt. It's a computational, rational process. I'm not sure how these technologies will evolve, but as of today, I feel like I'm doing something very different, and I don't feel threatened by them.
LVH: What future projects do you have lined up?
VL: At the moment, I'm preparing for my first institutional exhibition, which will take place in France at the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne in Reims in October. Next year, I will open my first exhibition in China at the TAG Museum in Qingdao.
Double Take, the latest exhibition curated by Lawrence Van Hagen, will open in Mayfair, London next month. More details to be revealed soon. Viola Leddi is represented by VIN VIN Vienna / Naples.
