Elisa Cella, Behind the cover ItaliaImballaggio 06/2024

Elisa Cella, born in Genoa in 1974, she’s an artist with a scientific academic background (she studied Mathematics in the faculty of Sciences of the State University of Milan, after obtaining the high school diploma in scientific studies, Ed.) and has always worked at the crossroads between biology and art.

In her more than twenty years of research, she has used circles as a characteristic sign - a module in modular representations - symbolizing matter and energy. Her works are generally open to a threefold interpretation: at first glance they seem like geometric and abstract works, then a biological matrix can be seen and, finally, deep down they refer to philosophical questions.

During the Covid 19 pandemic, Cella was fascinated by the coexistence of the horror of the disease and the beauty of the virus, whose forms became familiar to everyone. She then researched, reworked and represented this beauty: she started from an image of Sars-Cov2, redesigning its characteristic sign and using arbitrary colours. For the first time she used real images or drawings found in scientific papers, instead of simply drawing inspiration from them. She then set about verifying whether the same coexistence between the beauty of pathogens and the horror of the correlated diseases were to be found in other viruses and then also in bacteria and protozoa, finding that the answer was affirmative.

She proceeded by analogies, following a method of investigation very similar to a scientific one. After an initial phase of drawing the numerous microbes found, she created pictures and installations in laser-cut and painted iron.

The pictures here reproduced form part of MICROBIOTA, a wider project, which culminated in a personal exhibition at the Villa Contemporanea Art Gallery in Monza with a critique by Luca Panaro, in a limited-edition artist book for Chippendale Studio and in various collective exhibitions. The latest is This is the End (Villa Reale di Monza) organised by AND, the Tertiary Sector Association of which Elisa Cella is the president and with which she conceived and organised the collective exhibition which, in collaboration with associations, professionals and the Municipality of Monza, investigates critical issues of the contemporary world: pandemics, wars, migrations, the rights of women, the advent of artificial intelligence, overpopulation, climate change and property speculation.

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