Louisa Gagliardi – interview: ‘Something really important in my work is how disconnected we feel in this hyperconnected digital world’

At the opening of her show at MASI Lugano, Gagliardi says she draws from Renaissance art and surrealism, film and TV as much as social media, to create digitally manipulated images and printed portraits and landscapes that express the isolation and seduction of our online lives

Louisa Gagliardi. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva. Photo: Gertraud Presenhuber.

by VERONICA SIMPSON

Louisa Gagliardi’s work is born of the lure and luminosity of our online lives – the imagery that feeds our sense of nowness, while subverting our engagement with reality and with each other. For a large chunk of the population, ordinary life appears so much more aspirational when translated through the crystal elements embedded in our smartphones and laptops, via imagery tweaked by filters and editing tools and powered by light-emitting diodes. Having trained initially as a graphic designer, Gagliardi (b1989, Sion) is as alive to the slippery seductions of brand advertising as she is to the susceptibilities of millennials (and others) to carefully curated self-presentation; there is always a “more perfect” version of yourself to share on your socials.

But is she critiquing our addiction to this technology, or is she plugging into it as a power source? I think she is doing both. Many Moons at MASI Lugano, her biggest solo show to date, allows us to see how fully she inhabits many worlds. The symbolism and imagery deployed borrow as much from Renaissance and surrealist painting, film noir and David Lynch-esque dreamscapes, as they do from the aspirational lifestyle settings of celebrities and influencers. The figures in her paintings are usually androgynously elegant, simply suited, long haired, po-faced. Mostly they stare off to one side, never making eye contact with each other – and rarely with us. She talks here of her figures having a quality of “being seen and being prepared for it. I feel like the figures are very aware of presence. Like cats [they say]: ‘Look at me, but keep your distance.’”

Louisa Gagliardi. Roundabout, 2023. Nail polish, gel medium, ink on PVC, 270 x 360 cm. Ringier Collection, Switzerland.

It is clear when talking to her that there is a magpie eclecticism to her influences, but the works always have a Gagliardi sensibility; faces often eerily lit, in greens or lilacs, as if by a screen; but the skin also rendered with an alien smoothness and luminescence, enhanced by the sensuality of the PVC on which the images are printed. The bodies may be strangely elongated, melting or missing vital components; shadows may seem more present than the figures they accompany, and have their own strange and sticky essence – as in the russet-red varnished shadows of the figures in Roundabout (2023), marching around an ornamental light fitting on the ceiling. Her people are of the world but not quite in it.

Many Moons unveils new strands, such as the increasing presence of nature, as a commentary on climate change. But for her it is not a doom and disaster scenario. “They are really hopeful paintings,” she says. “We humans had our chance. We really fucked it up. We had our place, but nature claimed it.” Swamped (2024), for example, on the face of it depicts an abandoned car in a swamp, overtaken by a flock of storks. But the magical light effects in the sky, and its rainbow-hued reflections in the water, remind me of Caspar David Friedrich. If the subject were more sentimental, it might veer into kitsch. But it is an unlovely swamp. The trees have been reduced to fire-blasted stumps. The reeds are not a healthy green or wintry brown, but sickly pink or pale puce. However, the plumage of the storks is immaculate. Whatever has happened to this landscape, these birds are clearly thriving. And the car, weirdly, is also immaculate; its shining white paintwork unscratched, its leather upholstery and even its tyres are plump and unscathed. Like the best of her paintings, this rewards close observation, for little gestures or tricks, surprises; the level of detail. Some of the birds in the sky appear blurred, as if reflected in moving water, for example, while the birds in the water – and their reflections – are crisp and clear.

Louisa Gagliardi. Curtain Calls, 2025. Nail polish, ink on PVC, three panels, 232 x 732 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich/Vienna.

Also new for Lugano is a movement into a more three-dimensional representation, with two rooms lined with her sensuous, dream-like, ceiling-height pictures. One, Curtain Calls (2025), is like the interior of an endless, luxurious lobby, in mostly monochrome. In every vista, these floor-length curtains part and close, while identically suited, androgynous characters move around the imagined space. The classic Le Corbusier LC2 chair is depicted in some of the images but is also present in the room – two of them face each other at its centre. I’m not sure if the quantity of these eerily similar scenes, stretched all along the walls, with their consistent imagery, objects and mood, says anything more than can be said with just one of her usual wall works; and, for me, having two of the chairs transform from 2D to 3D didn’t elevate this encounter into anything other than wall art with props. But this is new territory, and Gagliardi will undoubtedly hone and refine her approach – which I could see translating to moving image quite powerfully, as well as installation.

Louisa Gagliardi. Swamped, 2024. Gel medium, nail polish, ink on PVC, 200 x 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galeria David Radziszzewski, Warsaw/Vienna.

Gagliardi, a native of Switzerland, lives in Zurich. She first studied graphic design at the Ecole Cantonale d’art de Lausanne, with a six-month stint at Amsterdam’s Gerrit Rietveld Academie, graduating with a BA in 2012.  She freelanced as a graphic designer, working for commercial clients including the fashion label Kenzo and the watchmaker Hublot, but began making paintings in the summer of 2015, and was rapidly embraced by the art world. In 2016, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets included her paintings in their Filter Bubble survey of post-internet art at the Luma Foundation in Arles. She also featured in Phaidon’s Vitamin P3 survey of contemporary painting. Her early figures – which she has said were, in inspiration, “very Fernand Léger” – have evolved. She creates her images from a mixture of drawing using a mouse or by hand and then photographing these drawings and digitally manipulating them, to edit and re-edit them until the work lands just the right (or wrong, depending on your point of view) side of weird. She prints these images on to PVC, stretches them and then applies gel, clear varnish or nail varnish to highlight certain details, bringing a hyperreal quality to these reality-adjacent images. She has previously referenced the Berlin-based Petra Cortright as an artist working in a similar way.

The curator, Francesca Benini, describes Gagliardi’s work as: “A very nice example of how painting can really reinvent itself. Painting always remains a powerful inventive medium in our time.” But Gagliardi’s contribution, she feels, matters because it is “very rooted in art history but at the same time … able to become a voice for our generation”.

Studio International spoke to artist at the opening of Many Moons.

Veronica Simpson: I am intrigued by your early art education. I read that you had a godmother who was an art expert, and she took you to Venice and Rome as a child and showed you paintings there. That sounds like a remarkable head start in art appreciation.

Louisa Gagliardi: I was quite young, maybe eight or nine. It was so precious. I was really lucky to be born to a dad who is an architect, and my mother is an artist. We would go to cities, we would visit museums. I was crazy about art books. I fell in the soup, you know, when I was young. My godmother is an expert in religious paintings, and she took me on these trips and would pick maybe two pictures and point out all the signs, the symbols, and all the Baroque perspective and share these biblical stories. She would really curate this moment, this storytelling and it definitely stayed with me.

VS. I wonder if that infuses the sense of reverence in many of these paintings; of an elevated moment, which is very much about the quality of light. I noticed that with some of the newer works, although there is a luminosity to the characters’ faces, it is less that alien glow of your 2019-23 works where the skin looks as if lit by a screen.

LG: I mean, evolution is needed. I think the palette is still there. There’s still this cold tone that I subconsciously gravitate towards. Now I have started including nature more into it, but the PVC material gives this weird, skin-like, uncomfortable quality that is still there. I feel nature is taking a front seat a bit more, becoming the main character.

The painting Jackpot (2024), with the tunnel, is one of a few paintings where I’ve not added anybody in. I have battled with that painting so much. I kept adding something, because I love overcrowding. But I realise it’s much stronger as it is. I like that this scene is the main character and every time I added something, it would limit it.

Louisa Gagliardi. Jackpot, 2024. Gel medium, ink on PVC, 150 x 210 cm. Ringier Collection, Switzerland. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

VS: The cloud takes the place of a figure. We know it shouldn’t be there.

LG: Exactly, it’s the weird shape, the weird scale of it. And the weird position. And is it before or after a storm? That is also something important to me: capturing this liminal moment, when you could be too early or too late for the action.

VS: As the daughter of an architect, it is no surprise to me that you would be alert to the way in which interiors and architecture were, historically and especially now, via advertising and social media, representative of a particular kind of ambition and identity. For example, there is something very aspirational you capture in the glass bricks surrounding the stairs in Climbing (2024) and that sumptuous sofa and endless expanse of what looks like windows in Green Room (2023).

LG: Yes. But also that (feeling in) Green Room is like: no exit, no entry. They become like a character in your dream, when you feel sure it’s a place you know, but if you try to think about it the next day, there are only a few clues. I wanted these spaces to feel like that, where everyone can project the idea of a space. Only when nature comes in, do I go more representational.

Louisa Gagliardi. Climbing, 2024. Gel medium, ink on PVC, 210 x 150 cm. Ringier Collection, Switzerland. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

VS: The nature anchors these paintings?

LG: Yes. I never want to be too directive or make a lesson, but climate change is … the looming end of the world and, subconsciously, I can accept this idea of nature taking over. For me, these latest ones – Swamped and Quiet Exit (2023) – are really hopeful paintings, utopic/dystopic, but for the best. We humans had our chance. We really fucked it up. We had our place, but nature claimed it. Like images of Chernobyl, they are haunting but gorgeous: you see that life can keep on going even when we’re not around.

VS: But the aesthetic is not of ruination. The car is in the swamp, but it looks like a really nice car. The storks are having fun. The staircase in Quiet Exit as well looks like a gleaming institution, but through the stairs you see a Mexican prairie or desert. What is the connection?

LG: I saw it as like a passageway, my source was maybe a metro subway or passage. Again, this is a liminal space, a transitional place. I had just visited Marfa in Texas and spent time in the desert on a long weekend. I’m obsessed with tumbleweed. My partner [artist Adam Cruces] is from Texas. Being Swiss, I find these landscapes fascinating, so desolate and mysterious, full of life but much more hidden in a way.

Louisa Gagliardi. Green Room, 2023. Gel medium ink on PVC, three panels, 265 x 405 cm. Ringier Collection, Switzerland.

VS: Regarding Green Room, I like that from afar it looks like an aspirational picture of some amazing space, the ultimate chill-out lounge. Then you realise what you thought were the windows are paintings, and the people are blending into the sofas, sliding down them, melting. It’s that dreamscape again.

LG: Something really important in my work is how we feel in this hyperconnected digital world, and the solitude and anxiety that can induce, how disconnected we are, because algorithms are dictating what we look at. More and more, we’re afraid of individuals, afraid of other ideas. The conversation has stopped. Look at where we are now. That’s what I wanted to say. If you see these young people, none of them are interacting. The only characters trying to interact are the two dogs (in the paintings). And they are being physically restrained by two leashes, two hands, from the edges of the painting. So, it’s like this painting says we are craving for interaction but we’re so afraid of it. And the pandemic has completely heightened it. This fear of other people. How idiotic we are.

I want to be hopeful. I hope that in the paintings there is a little humour, that can transpire, with a little wink of let’s all cheer up a little bit.

Louisa Gagliardi. Cascade, 2023. Gel medium, ink on PVC, 300 x 200 cm. Collection Pictet.

VS: There are little dreamlike glitches, secret symbols or jokes: such as with Cascade (2023), the image of a person leaning over a sink as they drink, there are two sinks and two reflected faces staring out of them – and neither of them belong to this figure. I was interested in how you make your figures ambiguous in gender. I read an interview in which you said that, as soon as you make a figure definitively female or male, it comes to represent something else.

LG: Absolutely. I wouldn’t say especially as a female, but at the time, and still now, people are so quick to say, as a woman, if you paint a female: “So it’s about reproduction.” It’s so reductive. I wanted to put my identity aside in a way, so that it’s all there for each person to project themselves into. Also, if there’s a breast, then as a female painter it’s about sex. I don’t feel like that’s what I want to do. Some people can do it so beautifully, but it’s not what I want to put out there.

VS: It can be a limitation very quickly. But it’s interesting the sexiest picture is of two cats (Linked, 2019), one with arse its towards the viewer.

LG: Yes, staring you in the eye. (laughs).

Louisa Gagliardi. Linked, 2019. Nail polish, ink on PVC, 180 x 115 cm. Private collection. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

VS: It is very playful but are you also referencing our obsession with cats, the cats of Instagram?

LG: Yes, memes about cats. I have grown up with cats, they’re such arseholes. I am so envious of how little they care … Here’s a fun fact about this painting: I bought it back from auction for myself. It’s in my private collection because I love it so much. It feels so close to my heart. It’s the only work I’ve ever shown in my house. We always put it in front of guests when we sit down to dinner; they have to stare at it.

VS: It is very strategic the way your characters interact – or don’t – with each other or with the viewer.

LG: If you look at the works, very often the faces are seen through a glass or through a reflection. They are giving you that stare, or they are passive, suspended. You can feel the anxiety. It’s always a side eye, this idea of being seen and being prepared for it. I feel like the figures are very aware of presence. Like the cats (they say): “Look at me, but keep your distance.” I like that you often feel like an uninvited guest, this push-pull: Do they want me here or not? Look, but don’t come, stay away.

VS: There is a very cinematic quality to these works.
 
LG: Yes, absolutely for sure. I love film noir, I love [Lars von Trier’s] Melancholia, and even [Alain Resnais’s] Last Year in Marienbad, or films by Luis Buñuel, these are a huge influence. But I love the surrealists, such as De Chirico, with crazy shadows. My paintings are like, you know when you have movie stills to promote the movie? These are all the stills that would not be in the movie.

VS: The outtakes?

LG: Exactly, because it’s between and after the action, the transitional parts.

VS: And is David Lynch in there? In the immersive room you have created for this show, with all the curtains, in my notes I jotted it down as the Twin Peaks room.

LG: It’s called Black Lodge … in my mind. Then I thought is it too Black Lodge-y? Then I thought: who cares? What a good inspiration and now what a tribute [to Lynch, who died in January]. It was not intentional, but subconscious. But weirdly Twin Peaks is a comfort watch for me. I don’t know why. My partner and I watch it once a year, during the winter. There is so much love between the characters. Of course it’s fucking weird, but Lynch definitely brings this absurdity, the comedy.

Louisa Gagliardi. Curtain Calls, 2025 (detail). Nail polish, ink on PVC, three panels, 232 x 732 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich/Vienna.

VS: Can you share some other artistic influences?

LG: It depends. If I’m doing a cityscape for example, I will look at Japanese anime, because they are masters. Or I love the films of Akira Kurosawa. And if I am doing nature, for sure I will look at the impressionists … Bonnard, I always look up to him. Or I will take inspiration from the colour palette of Francis Bacon. It really depends on the painting I’m doing. Or architecture is sometimes the starting point … Those stairs in Climbing (2024) are the stairs at Schiphol airport. I was talking to my brother about wanting to do something with glass bricks, and he said there is this staircase in Schiphol, so I went and looked. Also, with the internet you have this immense library. It’s fantastic. The collection is all there.

VS: Do you use books as reference as well?

LG: Yes. Coming from a background in graphic design, I used to collect so many books. And then moving so many times, it was like never again. But now my partner and I are in a more settled space, we are building back a library. There is something romantic about taking out a book and having books around. Also, there is the mental break of going and getting the book, going to look for it, going into the library – the action of picking something up; if it takes time to find what you need, you might find something better on the way.

VS: What dictates where you add these little analogue touches – the varnish, the gel or nail varnish?

LG: I love what the glitter can do: you catch the light and it gives a little glint. And now I’m so used to the mouse, my wrist is very much in there. Everything is drawn. I have tried the pen [as a digital drawing tool] but I have been doing it for so long that the movement with the pen felt so weird. And I just didn’t like it. I felt so comfortable with this aspect, I just kept it. It was removing my hand, just enough. If you look at Matisse, sometimes he works with a really long brush …
 
To be honest with you, and I know we’re talking about artificial intelligence right now, I’m not against it at all. If it’s used correctly, it’s fantastic, but I don’t want to use it because I love drawing, I love painting. And if you take this away from me, you take away all the joy of what I like to do. I’ve really found my palette, I’ve found my brushes. That’s why it’s like painting for me.

The last thing I want is to fool people into thinking it’s traditional painting, that’s why I don’t frame them. You can see the spine. I use the term painter, because that’s the closest term that I can use to describe what I do. But I’m not dictating it at all. Is the label that important? But knowing how I use the medium, it really is like painting except my palette is already mixed. Every centimetre has been touched by my hand or by the mouse.

• Louisa Gagliardi: Many Moons is at MASI Lugano, Switzerland, until 20 July 2025.