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Johannes Girardoni
By Karlyn De Jongh & Sarah Gold
Johannes Girardoni is an Austrian-born, American sculptor and installation artist. Girardoni’s works are reductive investigations at the intersection of light and material through which he explores the continuously shifting relationship between reality and image. Girardoni is best known for his Light Reactive Organic Sculpture, in which the primary material vocabulary – found wood, beeswax, pigment – and its physical constellation, become both the carrier of an explicitly painterly event, while also being the foundation of an immaterial phenomenon. The works are often examinations of phenomenological processes, where a hollow or empty space – a tangible emptiness – turns out to be the actual center. Opposites and contradictions form fundamental structures in Girardoni’s work. His orchestration of material and light, presence and absence, things found and things formed, all resist clear fixation, thereby maintaining and creating works with their own non-derivable reality.
Among Girardoni’s recent works are site-specific sculptures and installations that blur the boundary between the disciplines of architecture and sculpture, re-orchestrate the “materials” of light and sound, and manipulate presence and representation. After spending time in West Africa on a research expedition with architects and scientists in 2008, Girardoni’s focus shifted to a critical inquiry of contemporary culture. The core of this discourse takes place at the intersection of digital information and analog material. The works draw attention to how our understanding of reality in the digital age increasingly appears at the interface of real and virtual content. Girardoni’s new over-painted, photo-based works titled Exposed Icons segue into this inquiry. These works question the integrity of the photograph as a carrier of archived information by deconstructing imagery of advertising billboards and using both digital pigment and material paint, to compress the virtual information of the photograph and the physical structure of the paint into a single pictorial architecture.
Girardoni’s recent projects span a wide array of media, but the core of his inquiry is rigorously situated at the intersection of light and matter, and intends to blur the line between material and virtual content. In his new sculptures and installations, Girardoni investigates the boundary of manufactured states and perceptual events by transposing electromagnetic waves of light onto the mechanical waves of sound through Spectro-Sonic Refrequencers, in effect making light audible. Girardoni immerses viewers in environments that integrate natural phenomena and digital information in subversive ways. The physical and virtual architecture of his work explores the limits of our sensory apparatus through an interface of digitally reconfigured information and naturally occurring perceptual phenomena. In the current cultural context, where the real and the virtual have started to converge and cross-pollinate in unprecedented ways, Girardoni confronts a new reality with constructs that combine digital and material expression in spatial, atmospheric and conceptually immersive work. Girardoni deliberately places the viewer at the center of these constructs and proposes a shifting definition of perception.
The artist lives and works in New York and Los Angeles.
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