Alice Visentin
/ Subacqueo
Sep 23 — Oct 31, 2021
Nevven
Molinsgatan 11
411 33 Gothenburg
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| Alice Visentin, Subacqueo, installation view. |
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| Alice Visentin, Subacqueo, installation view. |
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| Alice Visentin, Subacqueo, installation view. |
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| Alice Visentin, Subacqueo, installation view. |
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| Alice Visentin, Man with a Child in the Belly (detail), 2021 (Oil, acrylic, coloured pencil on canvas, 100 x 200 cm). |
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| Alice Visentin, Man with a Child in the Belly, 2021 (Oil, acrylic, coloured pencil on canvas, 100 x 200 cm). |
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| lice Visentin, Landscape with Antiquities (detail), 2021 (Oil acrylic on canvas, 100 x 200 cm). |
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| Alice Visentin, Landscape with Antiquities (detail), 2021 (Oil on canvas, 100 x 200 cm). |
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| Alice Visentin, Landscape with Antiquities, 2021 (Oil on canvas, 100 x 200 cm). |
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| Alice Visentin, Dance for the Ancestors (detail), 2021 (Oil, acrylic, crayon on canvas, 105 x 200 cm). |
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| Alice Visentin, Dance for the Ancestors, 2021 (Oil, acrylic, crayon on canvas, 105 x 200 cm). |
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| Alice Visentin, Subacqueo, installation view. |
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| Alice Visentin, Subacqueo, installation view. |
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| Alice Visentin, Midnight Fishing Party (detail), 2021 (Oil, watercolour on canvas, 100 x 200 cm). |
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| Alice Visentin, Midnight Fishing Party, 2021 (Oil, watercolour on canvas, 100 x 200 cm). |
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| Alice Visentin, River Crossing (detail), 2021 (Oil on canvas, 100 x 200 cm). |
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| Alice Visentin, River Crossing (detail), 2021 (Oil on canvas, 100 x 200 cm). |
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| Alice Visentin, River Crossing, 2021 (Oil on canvas, 100 x 200 cm). |
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| Alice Visentin, Three Women (detail), 2021 (Oil, oil-stick, acrylic on canvas, 105 x 200 cm). |
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| Alice Visentin, Three Women, 2021 (Oil, oil-stick, acrylic on canvas, 105 x 200 cm). |
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| Alice Visentin, Subacqueo, installation view. |
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| Alice Visentin, Subacqueo, installation view. |
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| Alice Visentin, Subacqueo, installation view. |
All pictures courtesy of Alice Visentin and NEVVEN.
Photography by David Eng.
Alice Visentin
Subacqueo
Sep 23 — Oct 31, 2021
“Hans was not mistaken,” he said.
“What you hear is the rushing of a torrent.”
“A torrent?” I exclaimed.“There can be no doubt;
a subterranean river is flowing around us.”
Jules Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 1864
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In a tradition whose origins are lost in the Nordic middle ages, it is said that during the night of Midsummer’s eve powerful magic can be performed and that the borders between the spiritual world and ours are thinner. Among the many rituals and celebrations connected to this special day in the Swedish calendar, a folk tradition tells that if at least seven different kinds of flowers are picked following a specific ritual and placed under ones’ own pillow during this magical night, one would dream of the person that they will marry. Around the middle of August, instead, in what is considered the midst of Summer in Southern Europe, large bonfires are lit on the hills of Piedmont, in Italy. A ritual descending from a past more ancient even than the Romans, these bonfires are both gifts and spells, to thank the gods on one side and scare the evil spirits which might destroy the crops on the coming winter, on the other. Alice Visentin’s paintings and drawings originate precisely in the light of stories, spells, and once living, now disappearing traditions as these. Stubbornly fascinated by this fading world, Visentin digs into a history that often involves shame: shame of a rural past, of poverty, or of its connections with magic and the occult, which has no place in nowadays world, and where tales, once sung by choirs, are now only told in whispers. Like a dowser with her stick, she feels for traditions that seem forgotten but, like a subterranean river, continue to flow underground. This is why Visentin refers to this world as underwater, Subacqueo, hidden under the surface, but still present, a whole world of knowledge, transmitted orally, which we have only lost the ability to understand.
This submerged world comes afloat in Visentin’s paintings and drawings through her vivid imagination and unique narrative capacity, in which the relations between the larger images, the small details composing them, and the constellations of words and lines linking them like a web, are connected by inhomogeneous and yet associative relations which feel magical as these ancient rites, and remind of those bonfires still dotting, every August, the Piedmont hills from which Visentin is coming from. The same fires appear in the Italian writer Cesare Pavese’s most famous book, The Moon and the Bonfires, where he wrote: “I believed for a long time that this small village, where I was born, was the whole world. Now that I’ve seen the world and I know it is made of many small villages, I am not so sure if I was that wrong when I was a boy.” Visentin’s works, drawing from both history and imagination, disclose to us the hidden spirit of her small village, the Piedmont region, and, by doing so, she reminds us of the richness of timeless cultures disappearing everywhere, but also of how much closer we all are never mind from which small village we come from and how these underground currents reach much further than our borders, silently watering our collective roots with magic and ancient wisdom we believed lost.
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Mattia Lullini and Alina Vergnano
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Alice Visentin (Italy, 1993) explores the possibilities of painting and drawing with flamboyant installations and forms as rich and uncontainable in their content as much as often impossible to locate chronologically. Her interest into folk traditions, rituals and wisdom blends idiosyncratically in her art and transcends her historical inspirations harbouring unexpected tableaux vivantes where nature, characters and ideas (often reified in the form of words) synchronically mix in an unmistakably personal language. Visentin has an MFA in Fine Arts from the Accademia Albertina in Turin and her exhibitions include shows with Galleria Continua (as part of the off-site project Una Boccata d’Arte in Avise), Galerie Rolando Anselmi in Berlin, Monitor Gallery and Gallery ADA in Rome, Dom in Palermo, Castello Di Perno in Monteforte D’Alba and Tile Project Space in Milan. Her work is also included in the collections of Museo Ettore Fico and Fondazione CRC, while, in 2020, she was awarded the AccadeMibac Prize and was exhibited at Palazzo delle Esposizioni as part of the extended-program of the 2020 Rome Quadrennial. Visentin lives and works in Turin, Italy.
NEVVEN
Molinsgatan 11
411 33 Göteborg
+ 46 760 86 73 05
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