Laura Pugno (b. 1975), born in a mountain village in the Biellese Alps, develops her artistic research from a deep connection with the alpine landscape, which has served from the very beginning as a privileged terrain for exploration. Her familiarity with this environment, combined with an innate curiosity and a strong impulse toward discovery, has guided her investigation for over twenty years into the landscape as a cognitive and relational space, a place where one can symbolically “settle.” Today, in a time when environmental crises are pervasive in our lives, Pugno feels an urgent need to express the complexity of this context through art. In the work Acting Out, the landscape is constructed within artificial sets and then reworked with brushstrokes that erase parts of the image, a paradoxical gesture that seeks to reveal the essential. This act of subtraction becomes a tool to redefine visual hierarchies and reorganize reality in a more conscious way. Her landscapes, while maintaining a material quality, do not present themselves as comforting views but as elusive spaces, capable of challenging our habitual ways of seeing the world through pre-established categories.