The title of the work – Hic sunt Dracones – recalls the ancient inscriptions on medieval cartographic maps, where this Latin wording was inserted at the edge of unknown areas still to be discovered, considered dangerous and therefore figured as populated by dragons and monstrous figures. The “Hunt-Leones Globe”, one of the oldest globes, today preserved in the New York Public Library, has this inscription written along the edges between China and the modern Thailand.
Taking inspiration from Chinese or Japanese art (such as from the artists Hao Liang, Cao Yan and the performer Li Binyuan), Bertaglia develops an Asiatic vision and conception of time and space. In Bertaglia’s work, the space presents a two-dimensional approach, denying the perspective illusion. In the same way, the time in her representation mixes and confuses present and past, the time of real life and the time of the myth, of the imagination. Often quoting Hao Liang and his contemporary landscapes – also in the use of silk as support for parts of her painting –, the artist resorts to a cyclic vision of time, with no sequential events, but a uniform and organic atmosphere.
The title of the artwork refers to a falsified, inventive and complex landscape representation, deliberately at the limit between reality and fantasy. If Bertaglia uses the usual oneiric and symbolic language, here the lack of figures and the compositional breakthrough thanks to the insertion of two silk drapes painted in watercolor, creates an in-depth reflection on the concept of margin, of threshold as physical space and of the imagination.
Sarah Corona, art curator, critic and journalist, writes about this series:
“While maps, through defined marks, clearly emphasize the boundaries between the known and unknown (territories), between the safe and the dangerous, between the explored and the mysterious, between reality and the imaginary, Bertaglia’s art unites these opposite concepts. On the canvas, she merges multiple worlds into one. Time is perceptible but circular rather than linear (hence the recurrent element of the circle). Lacking any aerial perspective or geometry or temporal references, her scapes (escapes, landscapes, mindscapes, datascapes) aren’t meant to be a presentation of nature or geography in the traditional sense, rather they are a dense compression of information absorbed at different moments in time and in space. Her paintings are neither naturalistic nor animistic; they lack any human figure, yet there is an anima that inhabits the canvas and reflects a state. Her art simultaneously unites and opens the distance between all these elements, offering an opportunity to delve in and to get lost.”
