Steiner is an artist experimenting unusual expressive techniques and materials: in this cycle of works Steiner relates to pictorial matter for the first time, and he does so by adopting fungal spores as pigment.
Nature has always been his constant source of inspiration. From butterflies made with flour and water – real wafers – to snow crystals made of ferrous material, Steiner explored the relationship between artifice and nature, until it became the center of his research.
For some years the artist has been carrying out a study on the mycological universe, starting from an original, almost ancestral passion, which has always led him into the woods to explore the fungal vegetation. By putting together, the exploratory act, a direct experience that establishes the work itself, with pictorial research, Steiner has made the impalpability of the spores the poetics of his latest works.
The exhibition at Gagliardi e Domke showcases the artist’s recent works, focused on this research.

«Since 2012 I have been collecting mushrooms and “posing” them to make the spores fall, in various colors, onto glass plates – explains the artist. I chose not to use cultivated mushrooms, but to make use of wild mushroom pigments and to use only those for the composition of the image. Each leaves different shades, for example the amanita muscaria, releases white, the iantinospores such as the hypholoma fasciculare or ‘falso chiodino’ release a violet, and then there are the rhodospores, with pink spores… Sometimes just one night is enough to obtain these veils of pigments, other times two or three days – he continues – but not all mushrooms are the same, some are capricious, others easier.»

In a journey that began in 2012 and continues until today, Carlo Steiner has created a real process of collection, sedimentation and conservation of spores, simultaneously directing his research on color rendering and shape to make it an investigation into very origin of painting. By perfecting the use of cardboard templates, he created shapes capable of “conveying” the spores into pre-established shapes, investigating the “taking shape” of what the artist calls a controlled randomness, a technique that involves a struggle between unpredictability and will, in an attempt to get them positioned where you want. In fact, the spores do not fall from the mushroom vertically, plumb, but being extremely volatile they are affected by even the slightest current of air, moving accordingly. Thus fascinated by living matter, and by how the randomness of the conditions in which it is found can influence the release of color in the desired quantity, whether determined by an inherent perishability or by climatic and soil-related factors, with the Spore series Steiner puts a challenge is underway between nature and artifice, aware of relying on a material that is certainly more “uncomfortable” than traditional painting but seeking in it possibilities and chromatic variations with a very rich range. And it is from these expectations that, by observing the slightest movements of the material, gives birth to glassy tables in which shapes and colors condense the lightness of the spores from which they are generated in the drama of a precarious but at the same time seductive tension.

Steiner’s attitude to open mind and experimentation is also proved by his participation in the SHAC project of the Babelica Cultural Association financed by the Crt Foundation: an educational path of collective curation of the exhibition entrusted to a fourth year class of the G. E. Pestalozzi primary school of Turin. Recently, the S.M.A.K. museum also of Ghent has entrusted boys and girls with the rearrangement of part of the collection, and there are numerous institutions that are working with a view to broadening their audience, paying special attention to groups that normally do not benefit from cultural projects. . Joining the SHAC project of Carlo Steiner and the Gagliardi and Domke galleries allows us to rethink the curatorial process by sharing it, proposing a cultural welfare path that believes in art and creative languages as tools to integrate the training offer and contribute to help the citizens of tomorrow grow.