visual logbook of the transoceanic journey made by Mariagrazia Pontorno, in the two hundredth anniversary of Leopoldina Habsburg’s expedition to Rio de Janeiro. Moleskine Notebook records the 33 days of navigation with a monochrome approach: the use of a palette only limited to blue and golden tones returns the modulation of sky and sea of the Oceanic crossing.
” I begin to draw the logbook for the Moleskine Foundation, choosing to do two monochromes every day, to fix the chromatic modulations of sky and sea on paper, during the day and the night. I specially brought with me a wide range of blues, and grays, and also golden for when I will begin to see the starred sky “.
Mariagrazia Pontorno was born in Catania in 1978. She lives and works in Rome. She builds real-seeming settings inspired by a poetic vision, in which the borders between fiction and reality are lyrically blurred, in order to create images that recall everyday life and the passage of time: all that seems to be familiar, safe and well known, suddenly becomes distant, extraneous and uncanny. In her most recent works, the intersection between reality and fiction, archival material and digital reconstructed images has become more complex. Her work has been shown in Italian and international museums, including MAXXI in Rome, MACRO in Rome, the Biedermann Museum in Donaueschingen, the Stadtgalerie in Kiel, MLAC in Rome, Museo di Castel S.Elmo in Naples, Art Center di Thessaloniki, Museo RISO in Palermo, as well as in galleries and non-profit venues such as Monitor in Rome, ISCP in New York, HSF in New York, Passaggi Arte Contemporanea in Pisa, and Casa Musumeci Greco in Rome.
