GENEVA.- Xippas Geneva presents Parallaxe, Carolina Fontana’s first solo exhibition in Geneva.

The Transcendental Landscape : Some Reflections on the Recent Work of Carolina Fontana

When Carolina Fontana was invited to present a solo exhibition this spring at the Xippas gallery in Geneva, the artist decided to travel through the cantons of Geneva, Bern, and Luzern.

This seemingly anecdotal detail reveals a processual dimension that her paintings do not immediately make explicit.

The canvases that Carolina Fontana has created in recent years, in the series entitled Z·E·N, are the result of a contemplative experience of the landscape. These works possess a poetic dimension that arises from the process itself; they are intimately connected to a method embodied in the artist’s travels across Switzerland and, previously, in certain cities in Spain and China.

If we situate these paintings within the tradition of landscape, this need to experience and inhabit the landscape or, in other words, to produce a work out of contemplation, seems to revive the Romantic idea of the sublime. Within this aesthetic movement, the sublime in creation refers to an extraordinary and wondrous experience, vast and immeasurable in scale, which can only arise from observing nature and landscape.

If beauty comforts and soothes us, the sublime unsettles and moves us. The immensity of what surrounds us seems to reduce us to ephemeral beings in the face of eternity.

And yet, these works bear the title Z·E·N, evoking a Japanese school of Buddhism that seeks, through intense meditative practice, to connect the body to its environment without the mediation of consciousness or reason. In this regard, Roland Barthes explains that this godless religion “appears as a vast practice intended to interrupt language, to break that kind of inner radio that constantly bombards us.”

Landscapes produced under the influence of Zen in Japanese art display a beauty defined by transience, by what is not fixed and cannot be controlled or understood through rational thought; they are boundless floating worlds.

Carolina Fontana’s paintings, in their free form, subtly seek to evoke this indeterminacy through the coexistence of figurative images and abstract forms. They arise from the desire to convey to the viewer this transcendental experience of the landscape. The titles of her recent works (CH Nevado Grindelwald, CH Luzern Punte, CH Luzern Reflejos) function as clues intended to activate this evocation.

This reminiscence, this sense of déjà vu, emerges as the viewer slowly approaches the work and recognizes, within the figurative elements, an image hidden in memory.

This evocation subtly connects us to the eternal intimacy of the landscape.

Manuel Neves, Paris, April 2026

Carolina Fontana was born in 1991 in Montevideo (Uruguay). She lives and works in Punta del Este (Uruguay).

Her work explores the complex relationships between humans, technology and their environment within a contemporary context shaped by hyperconnectivity. Her practice is grounded in a posthumanist approach, where the boundaries between the living, the digital, and the symbolic become increasingly porous. Through her painting, she questions how images contribute to the construction of our perceptions.

Her work has been exhibited in several major institutions, including the Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo (EAC), Montevideo (Uruguay), the SUBTE exhibition center, Montevideo (Uruguay), the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Atchugarry (MACA), Manantiales (Uruguay), the Iturria Foundation, Montevideo (Uruguay), and the Shenzhen Institute of Arts, Shenzhen (China).

Carolina Fontana was a finalist for the 61st National Visual Arts Prize (2024) as well as the Prix Paul Cézanne (2022 and 2024, with Special Mention).

She has received several artist residency grants in Uruguay, China, Spain and Brazil, including the China Arts Fellowship (UCLA / Shanghai Jiao Tong University). A grant from the Fundación Carolina (Madrid, Spain) notably enabled her to pursue a Master’s degree at the University of Girona (Spain) within the UNESCO UNITWIN program. She is currently the recipient of the 2025 Eduardo Víctor Haedo Grant (FEFCA, Ministry of Education and Culture, Uruguay), which will allow her to undertake an artist residency in Nara, Japan.

The artist will present a solo exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Atchugarry (MACA) in Manantiales (Uruguay) between 2026 and 2027. A monographic catalogue will be published by the end of the year.