LEONARDO ULIAN: REAL REALITY

For his second solo show with BEERS London, Italian artist Leonardo Ulian presents Real Reality, a series of new works that explore the relationship between reality, fantasy, and artistic creation. The young London-based artist works almost exclusively in circuit-board bits and found technological parts, paired with coloured sand, concrete, and steel, to suggest subtle states of being, transcendence, and euphoria. Calling into question the process of his own art practice, and overarching ideas like reality, technology, and human perception, the works strike a poignancy in our technological age and our desire for ideological or spiritual connectivity.

The title is based on a dream Ulian experienced in which a technologically advanced universe was consciously (and subjectively) constructed. With the rise of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the ubiquity of ‘the simulacra’ made famous by theorist Jean Baudrillard in the 1960s, questions that once seemed reserved for science-fiction are – in fact – beginning to dictate our sense of reality. In fact, Ulian states that “virtuality” is more real then the “reality” because everything in it is consciously decided, while the perception of the “reality” is effected by many factors such as personal believes, traditions and preconceptions.

Ulian’s newest work displays a desire to represent that which is hidden from the literal meaning attributed to objects or to identify the world around us. The result is a new visionary representation, a daydreaming fantasy made by the connection of geometric forms and the hidden syntax of the archetypes, that are the bases of the imaginary and dreamlike word of the artist.

For him, this “realness of reality” is a contrived territory represented through visual metaphor. His landscape is one viewed from above, where the macrocosmic becomes microcosmic, and is herein reduced to a symbolic vista of copper wires, colour-field gradient ‘windows’, electric cables like streams viewed from space, and various other ‘landmarks’ made of unknown components, electrodes, even sand and found objects. As viewers, we maintain the omniscient view of this harmony, where electronic and geometric chaos finds a sort of rythmic, peaceful serenity. Recently, natural scientists have discovered that history, geography, and even human activity – whether viewed in thousands of years, or hourly – falls into patterns of predictable repetition and can be strategically charted out* in predictable courses.

In fact, the word “real” originates from the Latin “res”, means ‘material object’, and this unexplainable but fascinating phenomena is precisely where Ulian has based his art: one that is both perceptible and imperceptible by our normal senses.