POMO Galerie

Pomo Galerie and Carlo Madesani have the pleasure to present “Cabinet of Curiosities — Capitolo II” an inventory of photographs by Olga Cafiero that express the dichotomy between art and science, nature and objects that, taking inspiration from the Renaissance Kuriositätetenkabinette, have the artistic intent of rebuilding the Universe in one room, as if everything were a singular organism. A sort of reconstruction of the cosmos through a hodgepodge of things that are rare and particular but always connected. Because it’s true: nothing is independent and central; each single part is just a detail of a bigger mosaic.

“Capitolo II is inspired by the Cabinets of Curiosities. The central line of a Renaissance Cabinet of Curiosities is the collector himself, who endlessly collects in an encyclopedic manner, and according to his own criteria, heterogeneous objects that he then organizes according to his taste, interests and passions. It is a subjective process, resulting in the reproduction of a personal and often magical world.

I assemble pictures of extraordinary and disquieting animals, relics, enlarged microscopic cells, contemporary machines, etc. I choose my subjects mainly driven by fascination and curiosity for oddness and peculiarities, two feelings that I aim to transpose into images. In order to achieve this, I seek the underlying tensions between the images of different nature by linking contrasted subjects. Through these repeated links, the realm of science and mechanics and the world of magic and mysterious alchemy concur again: these two domains are clearly distinct nowadays, but had a long intermingled history in our past culture. The criteria I choose to associate images among them may vary. These may be based on similarities of themes, or simply dictated by a choice of colours or textures. This way of setting my images underlines the heterogeneous nature of the subjects. Subjects of different nature lay side by side, images of different sizes overlap: the aim of this approach is to evoke connections and highlight contrasts of thematic and temporal nature, of colors, etc., but it is also to create motion and to play with space, thus inviting the reader to wander among topics and images.”

OLGA CAFIERO born in 1982, works and lives in Lausanne, switzerland. she graduated from Ecal (University of Arts and Design Lausanne) in 2011. Among various exhibitions, she won the swiss Design Award in 2011, in 2012 she was finalist at the Festival of fashion and photography in Hye?res, France, and was selected the same year to be published in the Foam Magazine Talent (The Netherlands).

CARLO MADESANI born in 1967, is an independent curator and gallerist of Camera16 contemporary art a gallery specialized in photography. He lives and works in Milan.