Giulia Dall'Olio

Critical text

Giulia Dall’Olio (b. 1983, Bologna) takes an intimate, meticulous approach to drawing with a focus on the theme of nature and human intervention. Though the portrayal of nature is rich in detail, the stimulus never comes from a photograph, but instead from an emotional memory of personal experience. The observer of her drawings tends to get lost in the depiction, amidst lights and shadows. Dall’Olio works on a dark charcoal base through clinical erasures made with a wide range of types of erasers, with different degrees of softness, which the artist sculpts on the basis of the type of nature to be represented. Her work attempts to ideally convey fragments of nature that man has literally erased in his constant intervention on the environment. In the new series of pieces, Dall’Olio starts from a drawing of natural elements, using the paper like a living material from which she removes parts, tearing them out cleanly, almost as if they had been finely chiseled. The subtracted part becomes a new work that can never be reassembled in the single whole from which it has forever been excluded. These salvaged charcoal fragments of nature vie with the colourful pastels and acrylics that represent human intervention, almost in pursuit of a desired but unreachable balance.

Text by Irina Zucca Alessandrelli