Home Sweet Home. For the Swiss artist Claudia Comte (Grancy, 1983) – born in the countryside and currently residing in the greenery around Basel – feeling at home means being immersed in the nature she is familiar with. Of her I of her trees of her, her hills, the land of the meadows around her house.
Called to Milan to create an exhibition in the city centre, she wanted to attempt the paradox: bringing the home garden into a purely urban context. Rebuilding a rural oasis precisely where it would be most unthinkable to find it. This is what you discover when you pass through the door of the Vistamare gallery: the floor disappears, completely covered with earth – Earth which comes directly from the garden of the house in Basel – on which his sculptures sprout like sprouts.
Claudia Comte: between nature, digital technology and minimalism
“Nature, as a ‘structure’, is a point of reference for me”. Thus Claudia Comte expresses her admiration for that plant and animal world in which she was born, and in which she lives immersed daily. “I want to show the perfection that already exists around us; show all the mathematics that already exists”. Nature is the undisputed protagonist of all his works and installations. From those in which it is immediately evident – in the shapes and materials – to the apparently more geometric and abstract works. Even in the black and white lines, in their more or less regular progression, in their curves, the biological and natural lifeblood is hidden. Just think, as she herself suggests, of mathematical perfection which characterizes certain organisms and ecosystems. Constantly repeating numbers, morphological patterns that testify to the incredible capacity for resistance and adaptation of some species. Miracles of balance, increasingly put to the test by climate change and human activity.
The article continues below
1 / 10
2 / 10
3 / 10
4 / 10
5 / 10
6 / 10
7 / 10
8 / 10
9 / 10
10 / 10
The post-human art of Claudia Comte
Taking inspiration from all these examples of nature, Comte creates his environmental installations. Installations in which biology is combined in synergy with technology. The artist in fact aspires to an ideal vision of post-human art: organic and digital merged into an indistinguishable whole.
As regards his figurative language, everything is in the name of graphic essentiality and repetition. His expressive vocabulary is abstract and minimal. Natural in the sculptural materials, monochromatic for the signs. An original style, which looks to great masters of contemporary art such as Sol LeWitt or John Armleder, making them its own in his narratives “bio-technological”.
Claudia Comte’s sculptures at Vistamare in Milan
In the exhibition set up in the spaces of the Milanese headquarters of Vistamare, the protagonists are undoubtedly three enormous sculptures. Francesca, Willy and Robin. A leaf, a coral, and a giant cactus respectively. They are all wooden works, created starting from 2023: a tragically important year for the artist, during which he saw one of the centuries-old redwoods of his garden. It is precisely from its enormous trunk – the largest sequoias can reach almost one hundred meters in height – that all the sculptures on display originated. To the three named, other smaller ones are added, each called with a person’s name. In fact, Comte had the habit of giving as titles the first names of friends, relatives, or even gallery owners and other figures important to his professional career. Francesca takes inspiration, for example, from the Swiss collector Francesca Thyssen.
Claudia Comte’s earth paintings from Vistamare in Milan
The soil from his Swiss garden doesn’t just cover every inch of the floor. It extends far beyond, reaching the walls, where it becomes the protagonist of a series of wall installations. Strips of canvas and wood, arranged in alternation with the white of the wall, create regular and monochrome geometric patterns. There her earth, spread on the surface both with the brush and with the hands, is at the center of a celebration of nature and a return to the essential primitivism of rock paintings created in caves.
Through this second installation corpus, the horizontal earth is associated with the vertical one, recalling in its alternation of full and empty spaces the biological rhythms of natural ecosystems. Very regular and perfect structures, which leave you speechless with their ability to find a balance on their own, without the need for any mathematical technology.
Emma Sedini
Artribune is also on Whatsapp. Simply click here to subscribe to the channel and always be updated
