Hilario Isola approaches concepts and elements in nature in a manner that appeal to, and reflect on, their intrinsic existence and properties. Working primarily with installation, drawing and sculpture, Isola creates delicate, often visually subtle compositions engaging with primary materials and poetic notions, responding directly to their immediate landscape and environment, or any particular exhibition space. Taking the ritualistic aspects of the exhibition as an object in itself, he has worked to change the paradigm of this encounter, questioning the boundaries of this artistic manifestation - spectator dynamic experience. Intrinsic to Isola’s practice is the notion of getting to the heart of the object or substance: living systems, photographs, drawings, music are distilled to their purest state, lulling the viewer into an uncontaminated line of thinking only to then flip that original thought and organically allow room for another. In recent years through a systematic process of observation and immersion, Isola has created self-generating systems, including living entities and artefacts, in which emergence and rhythm are indeterminate and exist beyond our corporeal existence. Engaging with, and subtly intervening in nature so as to reimagine it in artificial terms, Isola finds ever new ways to mark the persistence of biological life, harmonising elemental occurrences in terms of his own artistic drive. Coral systems, wine vineyards, hybrid honey, fermented fruit pigments, sounds of biological life regenerating. In each work, he reveals the innate textural and structural qualities of such natural elements—many of which emerge from his own agronomy—exposing the deep patterns of growth and time.
Hilario Isola has presented his work in Italy and abroad in shows at public and private institutions at NMNM Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Montecarlo; Art in General, NY; Artists Space, NY; SculptureCenter, NY;CCA, Montreal; Museion, Bozen; David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa ,Venezia; Fondazione Sandretto ReRebaudengoand GAM Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Torino; Mucem, Friche Belle de Mai Marseille.