BEATRICE PEDICONI
b. 1972, Italy
“Allow yourself to see as if you were passing away as swiftly as the patterns that form on a wave. Allow yourself to see as if you never moved. Allow yourself to be temporary and timeless. As you are.”
-Lyle Rexer, Brooklyn 2010 (Independent curator, writer, Faculty Member, School of Visual Art, New York.)
Beatrice Pediconi’s video work and still images transport viewers into a serene, alternate universe. Pediconi says “I have always been attracted by the temporary and timeless condition of our nature, by the ephemeral, contradictory and unpredictable reality around us and its inevitable consequence and evolution out of our control: Time itself is timeless? The big is small and vice versa? Joy and pain are related to each other? What is reality compared with illusion and fantasy? These are some of the themes that run through the last 10 years of my artist practice and which took me to use water as my primary medium instead of fixing paint permanently on a canvas or paper. The water allows me to draw ambiguous and illusionary images in movement and transition.”
The work of Beatrice Pediconi is charged with mystery and amazement, and the gestures she performs in her artistic process is attuned to capturing and accepting the unexpected: advance and retreat, action and perception. Her work bears witness to the possibility of another form of painting: painting that “mutates” not on the canvas, but in water, and with results that the artist can only partly control. From Subtle Bodies (texts written in ink, 2006), to the blue series (Untitled, 2009) which used plaster and powders, to Red (2011) incorporating experiments with various organic materials-- Pediconi’s use of immersions in the element of water has continued to grow. Her work aspires to couple the scientific observation of the behavior of materials and the challenge in capturing the process of creation. Her praxis finds its basis in the fragility of vision and its transformation.
Beatrice Pediconi was born in Rome, in 1972, and studied in both Rome and Paris. In 2010 she moved to New York, where she currently lives and works. Her studies in architecture led her to a passion for architectural photography, in which she was active in the years immediately following the attainment of her degree. At the same time she has undertaken an experimental artistic research that spins a gossamer network of dialog between chemistry, physics, mathematics, music, photography, video and installation, within a highly individual approach to painting. Her installation 9”/Unlimited was shown in 2014 as a solo exhibition at the Collezione Maramotti in Rome. Untitled, 2015 displayed in Arles as part of the exhibition “Together, photography: The collections of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie.” Pediconi’s work has been published by Actes Sud as part of the 424 page exhibition catalog titled, Une Collection: Maison Européenne de la Photographie. Additional publications include RED (De Luca Editori D’Arte, Rome, 2011), No Trace (Contrasto due Srl, Rome, 2011) and Something Alien (Danilo Montanari Editore, 2016). Pediconi’s recent exhibitions include: Sheen Center for Thought and Culture (New York), MACRO Via Nizza (Rome) and The Brooklyn Library projection (New York).