Curated by Marialuisa Pastò
October 6 – 20 October, 2018
Palazzo Monti
Piazza Tebaldo Brusato, 22
25121 Brescia
The light of the night is a revealing glare that vanishes when
silence comes and words become ineffective – while the eye forces its look
somewhere else, losing itself in distances that it cannot reach.
Work tools register their rest on the room walls and thoughts
trip into the weave of their thin shadows.
The night
suppresses the idle details of day, as does memory, and that
moment is the space for the privilege of an ordinary thought – recollections of
a recently concluded present get lost in the echo of images whispered by the
distracted city, almost as if they were the beginning of an unfinished
sentence.
They say reality is no more than hidden fiction. The desire to
preserve the memories of each experience is a quest for the connection with
whatever surrounds us – that gift book we received but never read, a helmet
laid on a shelf, the jacket we only wore once, the bike wheel we haven’t
repaired yet, the sealed packages of cleaning products forgotten on a wooden
shelf in the corner of the studio…
The fear of loss resembles a passive apnoea that mixes up living
the present and projecting a future resolution.
But the frenzy delays the action, the anxiety of the finish line
eclipses the conquer of waiting.
In the shadow spaces of the room, the objects lose their
outlines and impress their stylized traces on the surface, as if they were the
reverse side of a fine embroidery.
And while the night is patiently waiting to become day once
again, it leaves its place to a gap that turns into a new question.
In that hesitation, everything dissolves and the world lets
itself be seen.
There’s relief in the white space of waiting.
On its second edition, Palazzo
Monti Residency Program is happy to host “Represent”, the end of residency
exhibition by Francesco De Prezzo.
In its most literal sense, the term representation acquires the meaning of re-presentation – that is making something present again.
The title of the show “Represent” refers both to the act of
representing and to the content of the representative action itself, the image
that becomes object in order to be communicated to someone else.
The works by Francesco De Prezzo (*1994) are the result of an
action that copies from reality elements borrowed by the surrounding environment
and portions of its studio.
His subjects pass onto the canvas, giving life to faithful
reproductions that wonder about the spatial relation between each other and the
one between the observer and the observed object.
After this first phase comes a covering action,
through which the images resolve their authenticity in a process of
self-negation. Thick layers of white polish or solvent applied on the finished
forms wipe out most of their comprehension, keeping the integrity of just a few
fragments.
The big uniform layers of rolled color that overwrite
the preexisting image – as does the melted polish – transform the canvas into
an open space, full of possibilities where nothing seems to undermine the
circumstances of change.
De Prezzo rethink the relation between space and
dimension and raises questions on the dynamics of the fruition of art, giving them
a new interpretation.
His gesture is quiet and silent, transforming the
eloquence of the reproduced object into a link between concealment and
manifestation. It runs from painting
emphasis and
quests for a natural conclusion in the absence of noise, which – in fact –
hides by unveiling. And by doing this, it finally invites the observer into a
silent complicity.
- Marialuisa Pastò