Utopie Elettriche

2016 · Spazio Menexa (now Kou Gallery), Rome

With Gulia Liusikova

Utopie Elettriche is a series of works on paper that K. Lious made with her mother, Gulia Liusikova, painting four-handed on the same sheet and talking each work through as it took shape. The paper is cut, printed on old presses and coloured in watercolour.

At the centre of each sheet sits a diagram drawn in fine line. It may be one of Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism (1865), a measurement by Albrecht Dürer, Benjamin Betts’s late nineteenth-century attempt to give the unconscious a mathematical form, or a figure by the occultist Éliphas Lévi. Around it the colour gathers in dense, broken fields, and parts of the sheet are cut away.

Each diagram tries to hold the whole world in a single figure, as magicians, alchemists, Renaissance artists and theoretical physicists have tried to do. Utopia means ‘no place’, an ideal world that stands still. Electricity is movement and energy. The title sets the two against each other.

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12 April – 6 May 2016. Curated by Fabio Sindici.