Louisa Gagliardi’s slick, foreboding surrealism sums up 21st century anguish

No natural light enters the large exhibition space at MASI Lugano’s subterranean level. And for Swiss artist Louisa Gagliardi, that’s a good thing. It allowed her to alter the artificial light in the space with special filters that she attached to each of the spots in the ceiling. With her adjustments, the entire underground floor is now awash in a moody cold light, an unnatural greyish glare that, though lacking the romanticism of a full moon’s glow, still basks in its gloomy mystery.

A striking work titled Night Caps (2022), installed to the left-hand side of the entrance, shows a night-time scene captured from a perspective that suggests a nonhuman point of view. From the soil beneath a group of five Fly Agaric mushrooms — also known as magic mushrooms for their hallucinogenic effect — we peek at the faces of three young androgynous figures. They are looking down, encircling the fungi with bodies that appear gigantic from this upward-facing perspective. Above their heads looms a full moon, its craters bizarrely visible. Its light paints the night sky purple, while the gills on the underside of the red-capped mushrooms appear green. The three faces stare down at the mushrooms’ white-dotted red caps with empty expressions; one of them is holding two daisies in their hand. Next to Night Caps hangs another nocturnal scene. Titled Open Secret (2021), it depicts a large stone basin built along a stone wall, of the kind found in many old European towns and originally meant for horses entering a fortressed city. Though the basin is full, more water streams down from a metal spout. Two long-haired figures are bathing, their skin appearing greenish in the moonlight. A flight of pigeons has gathered around them to drink from the water basin.

Such enigmatic figurations are at the core of Gagliardi’s practice. Pregnant with symbolism that veers on the uncanny, her works confront the viewer with visual puzzles that plumb the depths of the subconscious. Her unusual technique enhances the disorienting effect of looking at her works, with their unclear sleekness and smooth materiality. In fact, Gagliardi transposes the act of painting into the digital, yet she does so in a rather analogue, not to say, cumbersome manner. She uses the paint-brush tool of software such as Photoshop to paint manually on a screen, layer by layer. She then prints the paintings on PVC sheets, stretching them over the frame, and sometimes adds details by hand with viscous gel paint or even nail polish.

Marking her first institutional exhibition in Switzerland, Gagliardi presents a series of large-scale paintings from recent years as well as two new massive painterly installations created especially for the Lugano show. The exhibition’s title, Many Moons, is a potent metaphor that hints at several of the artist’s recurring themes. One is, of course, time, both in the sense of its passing (many moons ago), as well as its projected imagination in popular culture. She trades in retro-futurist predictions, evoking depictions of the future in works of dystopian sci-fi cinema and speculative realist literature — many of which were in fact set in the at-the-time-still-distant year of 2025. But there are also references to the unique qualities of moonlight in film, photography and art history across her body of work, to nocturnal scenes and, notably, the alienation and isolation embodied by creatures of the night. Her depictions of environmental doom and alienated selfhood become all the more visceral upon the realisation that Gagliardi is emulating the cool blue light of screens that we are almost permanently illuminated by, isolated connectivity being another of her main themes.

Gagliardi’s slick, foreboding surrealism and evocations of 21st century anguish have struck a chord. In the age of polycrisis and uncertainty, there’s a strangely reassuring sense of timelessness in her brand of introspective neo-surrealism. Her work caught the attention of several renowned gallerists and her popularity among institutional and private collectors is evident in the exhibition’s wall texts, which indicate that most of the works are loaned from such holdings. The show’s curator, Francesca Benini, has been keeping an eye on Gagliardi’s trajectory since 2020 and recognised the moment to offer Gagliardi an institutional stage. “We always look at these careers that are emerging and have a connection to Switzerland,” Benini tells STIR. “Her formats were getting bigger and bigger and I knew this would be the right phase for a solo show.” Indeed, for this show, the artist went even bigger.

Gagliardi has created two site-specific installations, walkable cells that envelope the viewer and are immersive in the sense that, once surrounded by her paintings, one is unshielded from their inescapable melancholy. In one of these two works, a narrow entryway flanked by two vertical paintings, titled Gatekeeper (closed) and Gatekeeper (Open), (both 2024), leads into a room containing the work Curtain Calls (2025) installed along all of its walls. As the title suggests, it’s a scene heavy with full-length drapes straight out of a David Lynch movie, only in shades of grey. Which is not to say monochromatic. There’s a dizzying array of greens and purples in the scene, which is in turn ripe with repetitions. In areas where the curtain opens, it reveals a sleek glass architecture, a white-wood forest, or figures and objects that appear in the artist’s other works, hung just outside this enclosed space.

In true Lynchian manner, the figures in Curtain Calls cast shadows that appear sentient and shifting. Le Corbusier’s waiting-room classic, the LC2—an icon of standardised “good taste”—features in each of the painted panels and again as two facing models in the room. The artist has replicated the chair as a painterly object with trompe l’oeil watches painted on the cushioned seat and armrests. Meanwhile, the gatekeepers on either side of the entryway are also seated in LC2s.

Walking out of the enclosure and back into the main exhibition space, a massive rectangular work titled Cascade (2023) dominates the view. It shows a male figure bending to drink from a standard stainless-steel kitchen faucet. Dressed in black, he is staring back at the viewer from behind the water stream, and his face, which is placed precisely in the centre of the work’s classic vanishing point, is reflected in the full double sink below. He’s at the far end of a sleek stainless steel counter, on which a few half-empty glasses have been placed, one tilted over. Is he the last one at a party? Or is he loneliest when surrounded by people?

Artist Louisa Gagliardi’s exhibition ‘Many Moons’ is on view at Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana (MASI Lugano) from 16 February – 20 July, 2025

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