ELDORADA CHIPS

Giulia Maglionico - DIARY#04

curated by Francesca Baboni

The decline of a historical era is allegorically concealed behind golden and savory bags of chips. Eldorada chips represents an imaginary Eldorado, a consumerist paradise in which uncontrolled opulence is pursued, where the squandering of wealth translates into a sea of waste. The perfect fusion of form and color is clearly visible in Giulia Maglionico’s series #unmaredasalvare (a sea to save), where figuration reaches the extreme limit of narration and gives way to the abstraction of forms. Through a skillful interplay of volumes and solids, the artist creates a fluid and floating formal universe, in which each individual element possesses its own weight, determined by chromatic values, spatiality, and volumetric relationships.

In the artist’s works, divided into rather elaborate thematic series often linked to socially sensitive issues, such as violence against women or, in this case, environmental degradation and sustainability, one can trace references to the Pop Art of Andy Warhol, with affinities to the graffiti artists of the 1980s - the predecessors of contemporary street art - while simultaneously witnessing a transcendence of these models through the proposal of a profoundly contemporary style that combines painting and graphic signs without falling into the purely comic-book or illustrative realm.

A truly postmodern poetics - just as theorized by the philosopher François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition, his celebrated 1979 essay - not only in form but also in intention, insofar as postmodern art contests the representability and codification of reality through irony and allegorical propositions, relying on the hybridization of genres.

The expressive power of Giulia Maglionico’s two-dimensional jellyfish, endowed with their own precise and consequential movement, perfectly complements the underlying content, creating a strong connection between signifier and signified.

The fluorescent bag-shaped organisms effectively camouflage themselves among plastic elements in a play of essential compositions, while the containers empty and continue to float, infesting the seabeds. The red travelers with long comet-like tentacles move together in synchronized grace, almost dancing, as though they were protagonists of the same narrative path, metamorphically assuming the forms of the objects they encounter, whether shopping bags (Plastic bag), Coca-Cola cans (Enjoy), or potato chips. In the work Plastic net, for example, irony occupies a central role, as the artist’s denunciation is never dramatic but always treated with lightness and moderation. The football deliberately assumes the appearance of a discarded object, while the bag itself becomes the goal net. It is a tribute to the glory of Italia ‘90 and to World Cups belonging to a time that no longer exists, embodied in the moving object that enters the plastic sack rather than the goal.

Even the precious waters of the Fiji Islands are not spared (Cool blue) as a symbol of the excesses of a jaded consumerism, whose prestigious brand becomes refuse while retaining its graphic power. The flower depicted on the label is in fact similar to the flower jellyfish, as if it were the same organism inhabiting a place that has by now become identical to what invades it, in a kind of endlessly repeated narrative. The luminous work Clean and glam is inspired by the famous All detergent container, in which colorful fish swim beside the vessel as though it were displayed on a supermarket shelf, while the inscription evokes the idea of the sea as an immense and all-encompassing garbage dump. The led light captures the scene like a frame from a television screen, where the word "All" acquires a conceptual significance. Pollution thus becomes everything, anything. "Everything flows," the ancient Greeks used to say. So does waste.