U–Drawings, curated by Carson Chan, is a new project by Luca Pozzi, presented during Start–Milano
(September 2010) at Galleria Federico Luger. Fundamentally, the project examines the potential of drawing
as a primitive practice that has endured throughout the succession of historical eras. A basic tool that has
always been used to design, understand and visualize, U-Drawings approaches drawing as a device for
experimentation, a technology with which to reveal aspects of space and time.
Starting with the scientific groundwork laid by Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli’s innovative Loop Quantum
Gravity theory, and French engineer Raymond Aschheim’s Crystalline Hyperdiamond conjecture, Pozzi
connects these scientific ideas in a cycle of installations, sculptures and drawings, visually suspending them
within the context of an art exhibition. The U-Drawings were made by slowing the light emitted from a highfrequency
photon spray, and delaying its disappearance by capturing it on a phosphorescent surface—the
green glow frozen in photographs; a refusal of its vanishing.
Light, a major creative force for this exhibition, is understood as an element that ties together various
physical processes. Within Loop Quantum Gravity theory, every known matter is a result of a dialog between
particles that communicate through photons. For Pozzi, drawing with light channels the medium’s ability to
travel at unmatched speeds and connect distant places. Light is also a material shaping the forefront of
science today: In 2003, Nicolas Gisin at the University of Geneva teleported a single photon two kilometers
from its origin. Formulating his spin networks in 1971, Roger Penrose theorized that everything, in fact, is
the produced by the behavior of light.
In keeping with the logic of LQG, Pozzi similarly employs light as the basis for a creative architecture. The
forms generated are born from the intersection between science, art, religion, philosophy, literature and
Pozzi’s biography—permutations of various vectors made meaningful by the work. Like Supersymmetric
Partner (2007-10), shown in Pozzi’s solo exhibition at the Museo Marino Marini in Florence, the artist’s
agency is seen as a conduit for these forces. Closing the gap between the second and third dimension, Pozzi
positioned himself in front of Paolo Veronese’s banquet paintings in a series of photographs, bringing the
dimensions together in the photographic capture of a physical gesture, a release of energy. The moment the
shutter opened, Pozzi launched himself into the air, and as the shutter closed, he was fixed in an image as a
floating body in front of the giant canvases. In Schrödinger’s Cat through Piero della Francesca Influence
(2010), Piero della Francesca’s famous hanging egg from the Brera Madonna is rendered in three
dimensions, electromagnetically levitating over a tatami mat. Recently, Pozzi exhibited 9 Churches 9
Columns at the 3rd Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art. The piece, made for the exhibition, drew
inspiration from St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow.
Beyond his meticulous matrix of references, Pozzi’s work comes from a practice that involves multiple other
voices. Each project is formulated from theoretical contributions made by other researchers and artists by
way of interview conducted by Pozzi, and subsequently published in accompanying catalogs.
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Carson Chan
Spin Foam Network
Any behavior of matter is mediated by the absorption or the awarding of packets of energy made by photons. The work, inspired by
the research of Raymond Aschheim engineer, is a tangible example of network experienced by this quantum particle with-out mass
that can be teleported.
The “Y” structure, proposed on aluminum tubes, connect 12 dodecagonal mirrored surfaces on which were engraved the maps of
12 cities visited by the artist in the last year: Moscow; Berlin: Hong Kong; Paris; Miami; London; Shenzhen; Vatican City;
Shanghai; Grenoble; Géneve; Florence.
exhibition