Louisa Gagliardi Resists Interpretation

Whenever my old neighbours went on holiday, they would ask me to look after their cat. The first time this happened, the cat fell ill; she seemed to have injured her hind legs and was having difficulty walking properly. I took her to the vet who, after examining her, announced: ‘There is nothing wrong with this cat. She just misses her owners.’ I had forgotten all about this feline and her feigned limp, until two just like her appeared in Louisa Gagliardi’s Linked (2019), a digitally rendered image of a pair of black cats, poised as if they are prowling after each other in a circle. Attached to each of their collars is one end of a gold chain, which dangles between them, coiled on the ground to make a heart shape. They don’t seem troubled by this tether, forcing them to stay together; instead they simply stand opposite each other, aloof and – it appears – satisfied. 

Linked is possessed by an aesthetic flatness: no matter how close you get, it all has the same sleek, airbrushed quality, lacking any real texture. Gagliardi’s works are printed on vinyl and embellished with nail polish here or there, but these additions feel merely decorative. There’s a flatness of content, too: the image of the cats seems interesting at first, but it doesn’t get any more remarkable the more you look at it. There’s a blunt symbolism in the linking of the two cats – some fuzzy point about connection and love – but, beyond that, the image offers up little to reflect upon. Instead, I find my mind wandering off. All I can think to do is provide my own context. All I can think is: my neighbour had a cat who looked just like this. 

Many of Gagliardi’s surrealist, often trompe-l’œil images appear to have vaguely cryptic meanings, ready to be unlocked through closer examination: a man and a woman lifting their shirts to expose hollow openings where their torsos should be (Revealing, 2022); two dogs meeting in a grassy field, held on long leashes which are grasped by disembodied hands (Green Room, 2023). The more you look at them, however, the less these images make sense: the mysterious aesthetic of a symbol is there but it cannot be resolved into meaning – like a detective novel with no solution, these works are all clues and red herrings, sparks and flourishes leading down a path to nowhere. When Gagliardi’s images do have an evident message, it is often so superficial as to be completely benign: one particularly obvious work, Jackpot (2024), depicts a long green tunnel, the proverbial light shining at its end. 

If all this sounds overly critical, it needn’t: flatness can be the point. The same feeling arises when standing in front of an image by Andy Warhol, like his lithographs of Elizabeth Taylor (such as Liz, 1964). What’s interesting about those works isn’t so much the artistic technique or the inherent meaning of his compositions, but the thoughts they are designed to provoke – about the superficiality of celebrity culture, the absence of significance behind apparent symbols of contemporary society. The same effect is present in Gagliardi’s images: their lack of depth seems designed to elicit thoughts about how we construct meaning, the value we attach to things which can be made sense of. As a matter of taste, I don’t like Gagliardi’s works. But no exhibition in the past year has made me think more about what makes art interesting, about the merit of meaninglessness, about how taste and intellect can be at odds with each other. Or, for that matter, about my neighbours’ cat.

Louisa Gagliardi’s ‘Many Moons’ is on view at Museo d'arte della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, until 20 July 

_{Main image: Louisa Gagliardi, Chaperons, 2023, gel medium, ink on PVC, 1 × 1.6 m. Ringier Collection, Switzerland. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Stefan Altenburger Photography, Zürich}