“I embrace the idea of slow art- like slow food, I’m not looking for a fast art, but one that is about process, relationship with materials and introspection. The humble egg in paint recipes has given us beauty beyond measure through the painters of the past and present, drying as quickly as acrylic and without the micro plastics.”
Gagliano’s environmental consciousness stems from her family lineage. Raised in a family of farmers. it is as if, from a very early age, she has been trained to peel away the membrane of separation between us and the external natural world. Moved by a profound fascination and respect to nature and guided by a quest for coherence, Michelle Gagliano has been shaping her whole artistic practice around an eco-friendly approach. This intentionality fueled the elimination of all toxic materials from her process while introducing ground pigments, eggs, oils and solvents based in nuts and lavender, and handmade gessos instead.
With the development of synthetic painting in the 19th century and the invention of mineral spirit acrylics from the petroleum industry in the 1940s, which led to its mainstream use among contemporary artists, finding a natural and non-toxic alternative wasn’t an easy venture. Just as Raphael and his contemporaries looked back to the past to achieve lost formal perfection and revive ideals from classical antiquity, Gagliano had to excavate old recipes from the 16th century to find answers to the current environmental emergency. During this time, paint was often made with materials found directly in the environment—dirt, sticks, and even earwax from an ox. The focus wasn't on highly manufactured processes but rather on utilizing what was available in the natural surroundings, as the research scientist Spike Bucklow notes in his book The Alchemy of Paint.
This is during this time travel that Gagliano discovered Il Libro dell’arte by Cennino Cennini, a referential artisanal recipes book that was given to most Renaissance painters, a deep understanding of pigment properties. By going back 500 years, the artist could naturally avoid some modern chemical materials such as microplastic highly present in acrylic plastic and bypass some chemical and toxic elements such as cobalt and cadmiums.
By creating her own paint, the painter becomes an alchemist, much like the Renaissance painters who were directly involved in the paint preparation, as the presence of a massive stone, used for grinding colors in the workshop courtyard of Casa Santi in Urbino, reminds us.
Extract from the exhibition catalogue “A Casa”, text by Julia Rajacic
