Nail Polish Paintings Radiate Social Media's Alien Glow

Louisa Gagliardi’s 'La Belle Heure' series follows a couple into the night, where intimacy is hindered by the smartphone’s glow.

by Alyssa Buffenstein

March 16, 2016, 3:40pm

Louisa Gagliardi’s La Belle Heure. Images courtesy of the artist and Tomorrow Gallery

In our postmodern world of zombie formalism, painting can seem boring and redundant. It’s all the better, then, when contemporary paintings prove themselves worthwhile—like Louisa Gagliardi’s current show at Tomorrow Gallery, La Belle Heure. The overly-smooth, gradient-heavy style reflects not only the art historical precedents of a few Henris— Rousseau and Matisse—but also a shiny-smooth world shaped by the pressures of social media.

But the paintings’ airbrush quality wasn’t created with an actual airbrush, nor a virtual one via Photoshop. It was achieved with nail polish.

“I first started working with nail polish back in September,” Gagliardi tells The Creators Project. “It was a series representing stolen moments of loneliness in social situations, putting emphasis on the need for consumption, like alcohol, cigarettes, or checking your phone, as an attempt to find comfort and relief. I used these different varnishes, like the nail polish, gel medium or even latex, to accentuate the tenuous presence of the subjects.”

“Also, as the work is playing with the codes of painting, I liked using materials that are not meant for it.”

La Belle Heure follows a narrative of a couple as the night falls. The paintings—each titled with a time from 7:30 to 4:30—show the inescapable daytime created by 24-hour cities, and 24-hour social media notifications.

“I’m depicting a couple’s odyssey into the night. Entering the show, you enter their intimacy,” Gagliardi says.

“In English, La Belle Heure could be translated as 'the magic hour.' This moment, at the end of a hot summer day, just before it’s going to be dark, when everything gets quiet, it’s neither day or night, the light is beautiful and the temperature finally comfortable.”

In the paintings, the couple glows green, as if illuminated by the light of their MacBooks. In one, they touch each other’s hands through the mouth holes of masks they wear, groping for emotional connection while keeping up their constructed facades. This alienated, performative feeling is exactly what Gagliardi was going for.

“In most of the paintings, the figures are being lit by this blue/green screen-like light. Even if you are entering this couple’s private space, you will notice that they are always posing, always putting themselves in their best light, as if they knew we were looking at them. In the era of social media, we are never really alone,” Gagliardi said.