Group Show — Hidden Nature — Alberta Pane Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 23 → July 21, 2012

Maria Rebecca Ballestra is an artist strongly interested in political and ecological problems. Her ambitious project Journey into fragility invests all five continents to inform about the destruction of our environment and the irretrievable loss of nature; to warn about the implications and to engage people in its preservation. The video Dialogue for preservation consists of different interviews with artists and politicians, realised in Bern (Switzerland). It focuses on the challenges of a future altered by climate change and on the search of new social models reconciling man and nature.

Gayle Chong Kwan creates a world of her own for her photographs. She either uses plastic bottles or food products for the construction of landscapes, feeding the mind of the beholder with questions. Nature provides us with the means to live, farther up the hierarchy of needs we build cities: transformation of hydrates into energy, of energy into action — into creation. Gayle Chong Kwan reminds us of our most basic needs and how every human creation depends at the very end on natural goods, her works also evoke pollution and the urgency of recycling.

Teodoro Lupo offers us the most lyrical approach. His concern is to enlighten what lies hidden in the shadows, to cast light upon natural beauties. As children we were afraid of the dark, now this artist helps us to discover the beauty of a nightly forest. There are no dangers lurking in the woods, although the atmosphere rests mysterious. We may thus talk of enlightenment not only in the literal but also in the philosophical sense. Lupo celebrates the natural without dissecting it; he is preserving its secrets. These photographs succeed in unveiling not exposing.