DUE PER DUE: Aldo Mondino & Taisia Korotkova. Imaginaryscapes.
Within the exhibition cycle DUE PER DUE, C+N Gallery CANEPANERI is pleased to present “Imaginaryscapes”. The exhibition brings into dialogue the works of Aldo Mondino (Turin, Italy, 1938–2005) and Taisia Korotkova (Moscow, USSR, 1980; lives and works in Milan, Italy), through a reflection on landscape understood as an evolving imaginative construct, where reality and vision intertwine to generate possible worlds. Curated by Alessandra Franetovich, with a critical text by Laura Cherubini, the exhibition engages two practices that diverge in historical and cultural contexts yet converge in a shared territory: the elaboration of visions suspended between personal experience and symbolic projection, while also expressing distinct temporal conditions.
Within the broad spectrum of references present in the exhibition, Mondino’s gaze unfolds through experimentation with artistic languages and representations of place, permeated by the idea of travel, both real and mental, shaped by a period marked by his Parisian years and an engagement with Orientalism. His work narrates the concept of place as a cultural construction traversed by desire, memory, and symbolic stratification.
Conversely, Korotkova articulates a distinctly contemporary and critical inquiry into the collective tensions shaping our global present, dominated by the relationship between technology and humanity, as well as anthropocentric and neo-colonial perspectives. Her post-apocalyptic dynamics suggest an attempt to open and resolve these tensions by shifting attention toward landscape as a relational and dynamic field, a space for fluid, interspecies inhabitation.
The exhibition thus raises a central question: how do we imagine today the places of our lived experience and those that do not exist, and what cultural and political implications does this act entail? The neologism Imaginaryscapes seeks to expand the concept of “imaginative geography” theorized by Edward Said toward a notion of landscape-as-imagination, where the suffix “-scapes” evokes the complexity of contemporary spaces as open fields traversed by shifting boundaries. In the dialogue between Korotkova and Mondino, a tension emerges that makes visible the transformation of time: from individual journey to collective dimension, from exotic fascination to a critical re-examination of the present.
“Imaginaryscapes” thus becomes a space of open inquiry into the power of imagination to construct worlds, and into the never fully resolved possibility of inhabiting the images we produce.