Anri Sala Surface to Air i, ii, iii (Cipollino / Afternoon Slightly After), 2023

Sala’s group of frescoes, entitled Surface to Air, take as point of departure the artist’s own photographs of clouds, generally at a location specified by the coordinates in the title. Their billowing abstract shapes represent the epitome of changeability and constant flux, introducing to the new frescoes another layer of temporal dissonance. Thus, fresco—a medium that necessitates a speedy execution but then can survive over centuries or, under the right conditions, even millennia—and photography—a medium that, in its original analog form, records a moment in time—here capture a meteorological phenomenon, a formation created by an unimaginably complex interaction of unseen natural forces.

Another important aspect of these new works is the marble inlays. Playing on the colors of the fresco, the distinct material recalls the marble dust traditionally included in the rough ground (arriccio) on which the finer plaster (intonaco) is applied. The inlays evoke an even broader temporal register, that of the geological time it took to produce the crystallized stone with its distinct colors and striations. Their patterns recall the frequent painting of faux-marble surfaces and the practice of intarsia, the creation of images from inlaid pieces of wood or marble, popular in the Italian Renaissance. But it was not only the Renaissance that championed marble as a motif in frescoes and as a material for sculpture and architectural decoration, but also modernist architecture, where it appears in modernist icons such as Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion or his Tugendhat House.