Laura Pugno
Triptych, abrasion on photographic print, 88x68 cm each
The Jury motivated the choice as follows:
"An artist of sure talent, she makes herself the interpreter of a contemporary way of understanding painting in relation to photography, inserting in it the memory of passage and time."
Born in 1975 in Trivero (Biella), she lives and works in Turin.
Exhibitions include:
Greater Torino, Rä di Martino and Laura Pugno, Fondazione Sandretto Re Reabudengo, Turin (2012);
Not by chance, studio#5 Cabinet, Milan (2011).
Laura Pugno's works arise from a direct relationship with the reality she carefully chooses to reproduce. Initially devoted to painting, in recent years the artist has turned her attention to photography, experimenting with techniques of execution that are not limited to just shooting but evolve into direct interventions on the print with abrasions. Favorite subject is the landscape, captured by means of a perceptual detachment dictated by the decomposition of the image, which offers a vision that is no longer unitary and traditionally romantic. Proposals of Self is composed of three photographs with a single subject, a mountain glimpse. The scrapings exercised on the photographic material make explicit the desire to cancel, time after time, the most recognizable details of this panorama. Houses, huts, small churches and highland streams are in turn erased; in one photograph one detail emerges, in another yet another. The initial view is thus altered altogether and what is presented to the viewer is a vision where the system-landscape perceived in its custom is annihilated in favor of an expressive, formal and executive liberation.