Drawing on her Italian heritage and frequent homeland journeys to Italy, Melbourne-born artist Anna Caione addresses the shifting landscape of experience and recollection. Like the Arte Povera artists of the sixties and seventies, Caione‟s practice is concerned with subjective understandings of matter and space; with the flow of energy inherent in materials; and with vitality and memory. A kind of re-enactment, Caione‟s nostalgic sensibility is a way of imagining forward and looking for home; a way to hold or touch something without evaporating it.

Our distinctive memories are infinitely richer than their origins, and are often experienced as physical sensations. The body is overwhelmed by a smell or colour, sound, taste or texture that it tries to locate and relocate. Senses intertwine creating a kind of knot or „intreccio‟ in which image, world and language weave.

Caione engages this poetics of remembrance; reworking traditional, aristocratic textiles; used card-boxes; iconic graphics and raw pigments all sourced from Italy. These „fabrics‟ are holders and carriers that have undergone gradual and imperceptible change. In her choice of signature modernist Italian graphics like Fortunato Depero‟s designs for Campari and San Pellegrino – brands which are now widely recognized in many countries of the world – Caione considers the politics of globalization, taste and consumption.

Layering and stitching together pigments, swathes of material, torn card and typography, Caione resurrects into artworks those short-lived, material remnants of other times and places. Text is cut and abstracted. Broken barcodes and stamps, no longer read. Colours sing in chalky white silence and meaning sense is loosened.

In their fragmentation, these partial-objects are tentative and provisional – enough for the construction of fantasies, and enough to capture desire. Reminding us that time loops, they advance a personal archaeology of occurrence and gradual disappearance that counts back.

Martina Copeley
February 2013