I want to believe.
The X-Files


This phrase, which represented the core motivation for the majority of Detective Mulder’s actions on the popular TV show The X-Files, became a kind of anthem for the show’s enthusiastic fans. Mulder’s earnest pronouncement seems somehow silly and over simplified, and yet it nonetheless resonated profoundly with audiences because of its ultimate universality. Contained within this desire to believe is all the ambiguity, excitement, and fear associated with delving into the unknown. Efforts to explain the unexplainable, parse fact from fiction, and acknowledge the limitations of our perceptions may today take the form of a television series in which FBI agents try to get to the bottom of cases involving the supernatural, yet they have existed for thousands of years through such captivating and enduring narrative structures as the myth, the fable, and the ghost story. Describing her work as an “antidote to habit,” Italian artist Stefania Galegati examines the role of these cultural practices, taking as her subject everything from the haunted house to the dwarf to the fourth dimension and in the process, underscoring the relationship between belief and perception with a formal and artistic precision that is as beguiling as the stories within.

In Galegati’s digital video, Absolute Horizon of the Event, from 2001, a man (played by Italian actor Ivano Marescotti) walks along a dilapidated urban pathway and bumps into an invisible object. Knocked to the ground, the man is initially stunned but then begins to feel his way around what appears to be a human-scale doorway, eventually finding his way in and disappearing into a fourth dimension. Galegati then upends the expected conventional storyline about the dangers inherent to a journey into the void when her main character is simply ejected back onto the street, brushes himself off, and continues along as if nothing extraordinary has happened. This collapse of a clear-cut distinction between what is real and what is fantasy is inherent to all of Galegati’s work, which suggests that much of life—from religion to science—is not so much understood by empirical knowledge as it is wedded to image and perception. Our highly developed and mechanized powers of observation aside, Galegati continuously points to occurrences in which having an open mind, or believing, can account for a whole range of new experiences.

Working with several different media—including photography, sculpture, painting, and video—Galegati’s images often suggest a space that is invisible to the viewer. Traces or imprints of this space are represented, however, and the role of time becomes paramount through suggestions of motion and an instinctual and acute understanding of how narrative can be a catalyst for the spatial investigation inherent to the page, the canvas, or the gallery. In a series of large Lambda prints from 2001, a dwarf has left his not-so-subtle imprint upon a domestic setting. Although we never see the dwarf, the silhouette of his small figure leaves a void within the various pieces of furniture in which he presumably attempted to take refuge. These lively images become visual evidence of a process by which the things we identify as invisible or absent (or just diminutive) sometimes carry a much larger presence than those things sitting in front of our noses. Galegati encapsulates this conviction in an untitled sculpture from 2000 consisting of a terra cotta Samurai warrior who carries a piece of radioactive potassium in his belly. This miniature figurine, approximately eight inches high, is displayed in a covered vitrine accompanied by a Geiger meter that continuously beeps a warning of the presence of the radioactive materials. Commenting simultaneously upon the position of power assigned to the Samurai within Japanese history and the way superficial understandings of complex phenomena can lead to prescribing exaggerated attributes to objects, Galegati’s warrior embodies intensity, or a powerful presence within a small object.

Between 2001-2003 Galegati created a series of enchanting oil on canvas paintings of historical mansions, located primarily in Italy, that are said to be inhabited by ghosts. Painted on large canvases in a hyper-real, near photographic, style but with a soft palette that adds a sense of mystery to the works, the impressive architectural structures dominate the spaces. Yet if one looks closely, an apparition inevitably haunts the image, just as witnesses claim it has haunted the grounds portrayed. A little girl in a window, an old man hiding in the shadows, a monk in white robes, a child sitting on the lawn, a knight ready for combat—these ghostly characters are trapped in a space positioned outside of the everyday. Galegati has discussed her interest in “dead-zones” as spaces that prevent us from crossing a threshold. An early series of photographs, entitled Rewind, depicting sculptural installations in which she suspended everyday objects in a swirl of activity were meant to capture a moment in time and seem to reside in a space of beautiful but almost defeatist precariousness and inevitable entropy. In her latest work, there is a sense that physical, albeit invisible, and psychological boundaries can be traversed. Magic and trickery may be an illusion, but perhaps illusion, image, and simulation are as real as that which we can hold in our hands. Grappling with the unknown, the supernatural, or that which we don’t fully understand has always been the purview of science, religion, and literature. Her artwork allows Galegati to be the benevolent trickster—to create an illusion based in shared cultural narrative for us to enter, to confront, and perhaps even traverse, adding to our experiences and suspending our disbelief.


Anne Ellegood