For his 2012 artist’s book, Wonders of the Volcano, the Italian artist Salvatore Arancio reprinted a work of nineteenth-century popular science, transforming the engravings that illustrated it into geologically implausible fantasy landscapes, the better to bear out the promise of the book’s title. Though fanciful, these modifications are in keeping with the character of the text itself, which is filled with purple passages and makes no pretense at objectivity. Geology and exploration may have been heralded as ways of understanding the world, but they are also, paradoxically, ways of perpetuating its mystery. Arancio’s interventions mirror and exaggerate the responses of awe that are elicited and manipulated in such “scientific” representations, suggesting that they have always been present in the natural sciences.

Wonders of the Volcano was available for perusal in Arancio’s recent exhibition, where it was in tune with the photoetchings and collages that made up the rest of the show. In Contemplation depuis le Passo Ombretta (Contemplation from Passo Ombretta), 2012, Arancio has added a blotch of black ink to a photographic book illustration showing a curiously shaped mountain, forming a mushroomlike growth: The gothic and bizarre displaces an Ansel Adams–esque sublime. The artist’s interventions in other cases—for example, the triangle of golden paper superimposed on a landscape in Où le soleil recompose sa géométrie de lumière (Where the Sun Recomposes Its Geometry of Light), 2012, or the colored spots pasted onto the black-and-white calm of Le Fifre et L’ Ailefroide, 2012, named for two mountains in the Massif des Écrins in the French Alps—are more mathematically formal in their layering of images onto Alpine scenes, but similarly make collage into a kind of syncretism between different systems of interpretation.

In tracing our endeavors to understand and interpret the natural world, Arancio cross-pollinates the documentary with the purely aesthetic. The impact of a photograph of a mountain is not deconstructed, but rather brought to bear upon an explicitly artistic realm, in turn transforming the original image. The tension between these two modes is perhaps what is meant by the exhibition’s title, “Alternating Layers of Contrasting Resistance.” Arancio’s transubstantiation of found images operates differently from that in the seemingly related collages of, say, Haris Epaminonda. Her works emphasize a way of seeing, an inscription of art over natural formations, the work of other artists, and so on, while his suggest that all images partake in the mystical. As such, they connect with a wider discourse, inherited from the Romantics but with origins in the ancient world, according to which nature is inextricable from mythopoesis. Arancio reminds us that the irrational core of this search for meaning pervades even the photographic document or the geological illustration.

Indirectly and indistinctly, the invocation of a broader historical reach seemed to be the intention of Acis and Galatea, 2013, a video in which footage of rocks and a river in Italy is combined with a Russian cartoon depicting the Cyclops Polyphemus murdering Acis with a boulder out of jealousy over his relationship with the river nymph Galatea. Another video, Window of Possible Development, 2013, presented two digitally animated versions of seventeenth-century representations of our planet, making them into ornate spinning globes. For Arancio, it seems, mountains, volcanoes, and rocks are infused with Romantic ideas connected to what a historian might speak of as the simultaneous rise of Alpinism as a leisure pursuit and the popularization of geology as a discipline. Indeed, two ceramic sculptures, Pii and Ai-lauuu, both 2013, opened up the show’s agenda and shifted its register, unsettling the place of the artwork in this imbrication. Glazed in psychedelicpastel hues, these objects are clearly artificial and domesticated, yet they stake a claim to be resources of narratives and forms just as bountiful as mountains and rocks.

—Alexander Scrimgeour