In the Peruvian artist Elena Damiani’s first solo exhibit at Almeida & Dale, the passing of time and the ancestral landscapes of the Americas and other regions are imprinted into series purposely created for her Brazilian debut. In these artworks, which employ classical materials (travertine, marble) as well as contemporary ones (duralumin), Elena explores the themes that marked her unique trajectory: geology, archaeology, and cartography.

At age 46, the artist has just achieved well-deserved international recognition, having joined the Aichi Triennale 2025, with art direction by Hoor Al Qasimi, which opened September in Nagoya, Japan. The show was preceded by international exhibits in venues including Galerie Nordenhake, in Stockholm.

Marked by the architectural language of great masters, Elena took an interest in landscapes while studying the works of the Japanese Tadao Ando (1941), the Mexican Luis Barragán (1902-1988), and the Italian Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978), all three of whom equally explored the harmonious environment-history relationship.

“I have always been interested in the plastic aspect of architecture, especially the architect’s relationship with nature, particularly Carlo Scarpa, whose oeuvre sparked my choice of travertine,” recounts Elena.

Scarpa, who had a close relationship with contemporary Japanese architectural aesthetics, is the author of a showroom design commissioned in 1957 by the typewriter manufacturer Olivetti, now a museum, which has become a landmark, and whose prevailing material is travertine. Through it, Scarpa reaffirmed his connection to the history of Italy (travertine, as is known, was used in building the Colosseum and Saint Peter’s Basilica).

The very theme of the Aichi Triennale, A Time Between Ashes and Roses, inspired by the work of the Syrian poet Adonis, prompts reflection about the future built through geological views of time, i.e., with an eye on the past, like the visual work of Elena Damiani, also closely tied to poetic syntax.

The artist cites a book of short stories by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), The Book of Sand, as a key component in some of her own works. It should be noted that the goal of one of Borges’ stories is to “forever capture” the reader’s attention between the pages of its allegorical plot. An instance of this direct connection with literature is the site-specific installation Elena brings to her first solo show here, Relieve IV, the fourth variation on the piece shown at the Triennale in Japan, which employs materials such as hand-sculpted onyx, sand, white cement, ceramic plaster, and pigments.

Relieve IV was inspired by an artwork by the Italian Luciano Fabro (1936-2007), a very particular take of the myth of Sisyphus, mixing ordinary materials (flour) with noble ones (marble, gold leaf), as representatives of povera art were wont to do. Fabro rolls a marble cylinder on flour, portraying the mythical sacrifice of pushing a rock up a mountain.

Last August, Elena Damiani explored another geological process in the previously mentioned Swedish solo exhibit. There, Elena emphasized nature’s role as a living system by showing, at Galerie Nordenhake, how mineral shapes follow a dynamic of transmutation through the centuries, although they may seem immutable to contemporary eyes.

The Swedish exhibit included Strata Belt, composed of 105 travertine modules that harked back to erosion on sedimentary rocks. For the Almeida & Dale show, the corresponding piece is the enigmatic Testigos VII, made this year.

The Testigos series, according to Elena, is rather pictorial in character. It is reminiscent of an aerial view of desert areas, with layers that repeat and record, in a metaphorical representation, the passing of time.

Strata Belt references a homonymous artwork by the Swedish architect Alvar Aalto (1898-1976), transforming it into a modular structure of individually articulated travertine cylinders. In the Brazilian piece, 30 cylinders with the same limestone recompose the original stratification and evoke a sort of chronology of the planet’s history.

These natural patterns of organization define life on Earth as resulting from a mysterious fracture, dispelling the misperception of travertine as an inert, stable material. For Elena, they reveal the interconnection of matter with underlying processes that create our environment. The Earth, concludes the artist, is just like travertine: a living organism under constant mutation.