Behind the hermetic title Your Payment Verification Code is 26QNFLU9, Ana Cardoso presents a research on painting and the act of painting on the walls of Renata Fabbri Gallery, Milan.

Ana’s art is a demonstrative moment, the personality branching of shapes and colours unwilling to be restricted to the canvas as usual.

Ana, like an alchemist, borrows the primordial landmarks of painting – which Wassily Kandinsky designated as “point”, “line” and “plane” – and places them elsewhere. The artist’s structures – which we define succinctly as “paintings” – reflect a shattered geometry, where painting appears and disappears like a permanent embrace and abandonment. Ana Cardoso’s schematic lines do not begin or end: they are a constant remodelling that looks more like a puzzle, as they constantly challenge the perception we have when imagining what lies behind the word “painting” or “art”.

The artist’s work could be defined as “surrealist”, as the painting seems to go beyond reality, albeit using the oldest elements of creation: the point, line and plane. But this is not only an abstract idea, on the contrary. Ana Cardoso’s items bewilder our gaze, always willing to pose questions on our knowledge’s identity.

It is said that human beings recognise better what they have studied. That is, we see what we know. But, when faced with Ana Cardoso’s pictorial objects, even those who know contemporary art are surprised. They are mysterious, they always seem to demand a new combination, whose solution is both far and near, deceptively. And, most of all, it will never have a single pattern.

A light suddenly clarifies the shadow of the title Your Payment Verification Code is 26QNFLU9: this is an allusion to the ephemeral traits of bureaucracy and the economic system that dominate our daily lives, whose gestation and shaping remain hidden from most of us, however life-altering they may be. Ana appropriates and abstracts the elements that “form” art, which we all know, adding to them a ciphered password that plays with the combinations between painting, architecture, technique, authorship, poetry.

Your Payment Verification Code is 26QNFLU9 is a musical score that goes beyond the pentagrams, reminding us of a quote associated with Pablo Picasso: “Critics, mathematicians, scientists and busybodies want to classify everything, marking the boundaries and limits… In art, there is room for all possibilities”.

Ana Cardoso’s Your Payment Verification Code is 26QNFLU9 is at Renata Fabbri Gallery, Milan until March 18, 2023.