In 1831, Prussian architect Carl Ferdinand Langhans built the Pleorama, an indoor simulation of a voyage around the Bay of Naples. Twenty-four passengers sat inside a wooden boat floating in a pool while enormous painted coastlines moved past on either side. The boat rocked, a boatman sang, the light changed and Mount Vesuvius appeared to erupt. The journey lasted an hour and went nowhere.
Domenico Gnoli was an Italian painter who enlarged the smallest details of clothing and furniture until they became strange, monumental landscapes. A collar, zipper, braid, pocket or corner of a bed might fill an entire canvas, usually with its owner cropped away. He mixed sand into acrylic paint, giving fabric the weight and texture of architecture. Gnoli died of cancer in 1970, aged 36, just as his paintings were gaining an international audience.
Tagasode, meaning “whose sleeves?”, are Japanese folding screens depicting magnificent robes draped over lacquer stands against fields of gold. The women who own them are absent, but their patterns, perfume bags and personal objects remain as clues to their beauty and taste. Inspired by an old poetic association between sleeves, scent and longing, the screens are portraits made entirely from what someone has left in the room.
Concha García Zaera was a Spanish digital artist who began using Microsoft Paint in her mid-seventies, after the smell of oil paint disturbed her ill husband. Working point by point with a mouse, she spent weeks constructing detailed landscapes inspired by photographs and postcards her husband had sent from his travels. Her granddaughter opened an Instagram account for her, and at 87 she became an unlikely star of pixel art. Disney later commissioned her to recreate the poster for Mary Poppins Returns entirely in Paint.
Hagop Sandaldjian was an Armenian musician and microminiaturist who made sculptures small enough to stand inside the eye of a needle. Using dust, lint, paint and strands of human hair, he produced tiny figures of Napoleon, Pope John Paul II and Disney characters under a microscope. A single work could take fourteen months. To prevent his pulse from ruining it, Sandaldjian learned to move his tools between heartbeats; a sneeze could erase months of work.
Ant Farm was an American art and architecture collective founded in San Francisco in 1968. Its members built inflatable structures, buried ten Cadillacs nose-first in the Texas desert and staged performances questioning the influence of television. Their projects treated American consumer culture as both raw material and subject matter.
Caspar Wolf was a Swiss painter best known for his dramatic landscapes of the Alps, which combined meticulous observation with Romantic grandeur. Active during the late 18th century, Wolf was among the first artists to focus extensively on alpine scenery, capturing its rugged beauty and geological features.
Cándido López was an Argentine soldier and painter who worked in the Naïve style. He is best known for his historical scenes from the Paraguayan War in which he fought.
Philippe Jullian was a French writer, illustrator, and art historian known for his wit, eccentricity, and deep engagement with the aesthetics of the Belle Époque and fin-de-siècle periods. Born in Bordeaux into an aristocratic family, Jullian developed an early fascination with decadence and symbolism, which became central themes in his work. He gained prominence through his biographies of cultural figures like Oscar Wilde, Edward VII, and Sarah Bernhardt, offering incisive and often humorous portraits of their lives and times.
David Rimanelli is an art critic.