September 5, 2026 | Art & Culture
GIUSEPPE LO SCHIAVO
SUSPICIOUS REALITY
words Onur Basturk
Giuseppe Lo Schiavo works at the edge of the real, where simplification meets excess and perception begins to shift. The Mediterranean, for him, is both memory and landscape.
Your images sit between the real and the artificial. Why does that interest you?
Honestly, I struggle with the very notion of "artificial." Everything that exists is real, or natural, in its own way. So I'm not sure I see myself as working between two territories; I'd rather say I'm questioning the border itself.
What interests me is reality on steroids — a hyperbole of the real, somewhere between simplification and amplification. A piece like Paris in Rosy Retrospection works exactly on that edge. It's a low-poly 3D scan of floral arrangements found discarded on a Parisian street before being moved inside a hotel. The reduction in geometry strips the bouquet down, and at the same time the image amplifies its presence. Simplification and excess at the same time — that's the territory I'm interested in.
Your landscapes feel familiar, yet slightly off. What role does this dissonance play?
Yes, the dissonance is deliberate. The Windowscapes series is built on hybrids, and that slight off-ness is exactly the point. Our brain isn't used to seeing reality amplified at that level, because amplification is usually something we reserve for memory, not for what's in front of us in the present. So the viewer is caught in a small cognitive short-circuit, looking at something that behaves like a memory but presents itself as a live image. That confusion is part of the attraction. I think of these works as cognitive experiments more than landscapes.
You work with AI and digital tools, yet retain strong authorship. How do you define your role?
There's a misconception I'd like to address. Most of my work isn't AI-generated; it's built on digital craftsmanship, which is almost the opposite of AI. I model everything in 3D from scratch. I use physics-based simulation software to render wind, sun, clouds — the camera itself. Every element is sculpted by hand in a virtual space, and then a photograph is taken inside that space. A single piece can take months to build.
In that sense, my process is closer to a painter's than to someone prompting a model with text. I have full authorial control over the scene and every atmospheric element. AI enters my practice only in specific cases, mostly for complex video animations or code-based experiments, where the medium itself becomes part of the inquiry. I don't curate outputs; I build the world the image comes from.
I’M NOT INTERESTED IN AN ACCURATE REALITY, BUT IN IT’S SUREEAL EDGE — A “SUSPICIOUS REALITY” THAT FEELS PLAUSIBLE, YET NEVER QUITE SETTLES
Your work often suggests a “reconstructed nature.” Are you representing it, or reimagining it?
I reimagine it. I'm not interested in an accurate version of reality; I'm interested in its surreal edge, in what I'd call a suspicious reality — something that looks plausible but doesn't quite let you settle into it. And I'd push back gently on the word "nature" itself. I apply the same logic to other subjects, for instance in Fragments of Reality, where I worked with a 3D scan of a destroyed car coming from a war zone in Ukraine, placing it inside a refined domestic interior. The object carries a weight that doesn't belong to the space it now inhabits — a memory intruding into a setting that wasn't built to hold it. A Windowscape can be a landscape, but it can also be an interior view treated as one. So what I'm really reimagining is perception, more than nature as a category.
Your images carry a quiet, almost romantic atmosphere. How do you position yourself in relation to that tradition?
I understand the reading, but I'd distance myself from that tradition. The romantic landscape is built around an observer — often a heroic one — projecting meaning onto vastness. In my work, that figure isn't there, and human presence is absent altogether. What's left isn't contemplation; it's emptiness, suspension, waiting. The viewer can sit in a space where nothing is happening yet.
MY SCHOOL WAS ON THE BEACH. THE SEA IS, QUITE LITERALLY, MY PLACENTA — I KNOW ITS LIGHT AND THE STORIES IT CARRIES
In recent works — including those shown at Art Paris 2026 — the presence of the sea feels particularly strong. What does the Mediterranean represent to you?
I was born in Calabria, in what was once Magna Graecia. My school was on the beach. The sea is, quite literally, my placenta. I know its light; I know the stories it has carried across centuries.
The Mediterranean has been a recurring subject in my work, most recently in a video installation at Palazzo Vecchio in Florence on the migration routes from North Africa, and in Southern Gateway, a piece commissioned by Bvlgari, where the 3D scan of an ancient sculpture from the Vatican Museum becomes a threshold — a passage between cultures, journeys and time. So for me, the Mediterranean is never just a landscape. It's dream and memory at once, light and border at once.
These framed views towards the sea suggest both distance and longing. What sits behind them?
The series started during lockdown, when windows became our only way of looking at the world. That period left a mark on the work — the window as a device that connects and separates at the same time, a frame that lets you see but not reach. There's also a more personal layer. My father was a window maker. I don't think I control that influence; it's something I'm unconsciously drawn to, and I've stopped trying to explain it away. So the longing in these images isn't only about the sea — it's about the threshold itself, what it means to look from inside towards something you can't quite touch.
What has most shaped your visual language?
The most formative influence on my work isn't artistic; it's evolutionary biology. It gave me a kind of detachment from reality — a way of looking at the world more objectively, from a distance that lets me hold two things at once: that everything makes sense, and that nothing really does. That tension is the engine of my visual language.
On the visual side, video art and performance have been central. Bill Viola and Studio Azzurro shaped my sense of time, slowness and immersion — the idea that a video, or an image, can be deeply transformative and evocative. Dimitris Papaioannou — an Aegean voice that resonates with the themes of this issue — for the way he composes the body into living tableaux that feel sculptural and cinematic at once, with references to ancient Greek art.
