Chris Rocchegiani’s artistic practice is characterized by the simultaneous presence of several styles and executive solutions, referring to different pictorial modes. In her canvases, in fact, we recognize sections of differing natures. There are gestural and informal parts, characterized by the predominance of signs and action. There are aniconic areas of pure colour, tending towards more lyrical aspects. There are episodes where frugal, synthetic figuration is suggested, where elements on the canvas seem scraps of a reality reconstructed through essentially mnemonic means. The artist’s work is therefore based on a multiple, discontinuous and metamorphic language, differing linguistically from the more usual pictorial forms, which are based on a monolithic sense of identity. For Rocchegiani, in fact, painting is the exercise of intimate liberty, a tormented inquiry that, while plunging forward in a clear, programmed direction, also anarchically allows retreat, re-examination, dissipation, polyhedral development, contradiction and zigzagging. Her canvases are thus fields of possibilities, of uncertainties that are overcome but which may reappear, of colour that is present but may lead to second thoughts. There are so many real or potential paintings to be stratified on the surface, all coexisting in a state of continual tension. Observers must exercise themselves by recomposing and re-stitching it all to grasp the words whispered on the canvas by the elements.

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A fragmented world examines the physical, chemical and geological interconnections between the many players that are part of a complex and detailed system of relationships. In long sequence shot, the video shows a runner on the slopes of Etna, rendered in severe black and white. The man moves rapidly in a rugged, lunar-like landscape, among open faults, enormous masses, lava seas, depressions and sudden drops. He has no apparent destination and his body seems the only sign of life amid the seeming immobility of the gaunt, bare and inhospitable volcanic surroundings. The work is inspired by the Theory of Fracture, studied by the physicist Bruno Giorgini from the 1960s, in which the scholar analyses the behaviour and reaction of variables in the presence of breakages. The fracture is followed by an unpredictable, chaotic situation, with variables that go crazy in the face of a combination of complex interactions never previously experienced. It is a condition found in natural, geological and physical phenomena, but it also appears in economy and finance. Elena Mazzi’s and Sara Tirelli’s work also alludes to what happens when it is human equilibria that fracture, that is to say, when individual, social and political variables are considered. From this perspective, the runner seems to move on the edge of an abyss, leaving the observer in constant apprehension. The risks he is facing are exactly the same as those we ourselves are incurring unawares.

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The works by Debora Hirsch presented in the exhibition are complementary and the relationship between them is unsettling. The first work, Iconography of silence, consists of two videos, assembledas a diptych. The artist tackles the dramatic theme of abuse of women, choosing a stark language that concedes nothing to rhetoric or the spectacular. In the first video, fragmentary images of violence recorded by CCTV emerge from the rear of the screen. They are frantic for a few instants then give way to disconcertion and silence. In the second, we see little by little, in red letters, the composition of real phrases that have accompanied the violent episodes. The flow of words eventually establishes a texture that pierces the eye. The violence thus finds a voice which the absence of sound characterizing the work renders all the more impactful. The mirror surface of the two screens completes the sense of the piece: observers find their own image there, captured by the video as if to certify the impossibility of their standing aside. Opposite, the large canvas from the Firmamento series has a compensatory effect. The composition is airy and imaginative. Hirsch lays out on the surface of the canvas, very freely, elements derived from Latin visual sensibility. The appearance is deliberately neutral and decorative. The sensation, for the observer, is that this tangle of shapes is hiding a thaumaturgic function, which moderates and counterbalances the evil sealed within the black boxes of the video.

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Isabella Pers’s research has derived, in recent years, from a direct dialogue with citizens and political activists living along coasts and on small islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans where lives are at risk from the gradual but inexorable rise in the sea level. Her paintings bear witness to the dramatic effects of climate change on people’s lives – people who have undergone a transition from the condition of natural paradise to that of the disaster which, as single citizens of this world, we cannot easily avert, if not by reconsidering our lifestyle and attempting to limit the use of fossil fuels. The recent drawings in The Aba series, instead, reproduce the screenshots of several information or tour sites that propose trips to places that are destined to disappear in the ensuing years as a result of the rising tides, Venice included. The invitation proves a mournful one, all things considered, a melancholy summons to enjoy these beauties when we are already on the edge of a precipice. The video Present relates an action created by the artist together with immigrants who had escaped from countries at war or who were victims of dictatorships. It is a walk which took place towards the top of a hill on the Carso, alongside one of the First World War trenches, the signs of which, dug into the ground, seem the scars of a ravaged body. They represent symbolically the useless and over-reassuring frontiers traced by men. The action thus becomes the story of a meeting between different worlds and cultures, but also expresses a wish for solidarity and understanding that goes beyond the limits traced by diffidence.

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Esther Stocker’s artistic practice is directed towards the perceptive nature of the image and space, examining it both in paintings as well as in three-dimensional pieces and installations. Her works, lean and rational, analyse the optical ambiguity underlying geometric matrices, repetitions of the same forms and superimpositions of several patterns. Using simple and minimal tools such as the line, the polygon or simple black and white, Stocker creates visual structures where the elements force the eye into a condition of problematic interpretation or potential spatial ambiguity. The uncertainty, the conflict between several interpretative hypotheses, between two-dimensional forms and perspective views, create in the spectator a state of disorientation and playful amusement. But they also arouse fretfulness, since it is difficult to elude the desire to interpret except by looking elsewhere, closing our eyes or, when possible, touching the works with our hands. Stocker thus demonstrates instrumental limits embedded in the visual means with which we are accustomed to view the world, compelling us to challenge their pregnancy and real effectiveness. Her works, moreover, testify to the ability of the image, and art more generally, to construct worlds that are not there and to create indeterminate, abstract spaces. Places where the eye and the observer can lose the bearings that tie us to normality and lose their way.

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The works by Renata Boero presented in Libere tutte are part of her series of Cromogrammi. They are exhibited on the veranda, in the environment visually linked to the garden, with which context they establish a strict, intensely poetic dialogue. The canvases are not painted, but are the result of tried and tested processes whereby the colours released by certain selected herbs are made to drip onto the spread out canvases, which the artist then designs and folds, giving rhythm to the surface. The colours run and trip up in the pattern, creating ever-varying material concretions, and so giving rise to continual transformations of the surface. The impact with the sun and air during the drying phase completes the process, also allowing the atmospheric agents to act on the surfaces. The result is works in which nature comes into play, not as a subject to be represented, but as a controlled factor that acts on the making of the work. Time also has a role in the process, in the gradual consolidation of the folds, for example, where it collaborates in the physical and sculptural dimension of the work. The display on the veranda of Casa Testori has also emphasized another feature of these pieces by Renata Boero: the architectural dimension resulting from their verticality. The artist’s own thought comes into play in this vertical tension, since she associates an unexpected upward energy with these natural totems: complete formal identities that have acquired a spatial autonomy of their own.

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Beatrice Meoni’s work is characterized by the use of mellow, dense colours, and by gaunt, unadorned figuration that concentrates on minimal episodes, shadows, gleams of light, minutiae or anatomical details. Her gestures are extremely decisive, her brushstrokes simple but rich, her colour palette restrained, with greens, earth tones, and ochres returning frequently in her works. The artist’s recurring subjects refer to the domestic universe and the body, but they are rendered with a hushed intensity, with the placid silence typical of still life. The peacefulness and stasis of the images are just perceptibly interrupted by a dismembered body that suddenly changes its posture to fall into the void, or by a vase that appears, with simple lines, on the soft, opaque surface of a velvet. A vague sense of suspension inhabits her art, which often places the observer in a condition of contemplative intimacy, of erotic complicity, in which the spectator’s gaze is totally absorbed within the visual field of the work. It is a dynamic where the painting acts by attracting the observer’s attention, but seemingly feels, at the same time, a sort of prudery in displaying itself. It is a fear that makes it hold its breath when the spectator’s eyes fall upon it, interrogating it. But it is also a game in which the observer feels the curiosity and surprise of an unexpected happening, far from any foreseeable possibility. It is a reference to an imaginary elsewhere in which spectators can lose themselves in contemplation.

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Laura Pugno’s art aims to undermine or overturn spectators’ expectations, putting them in difficulty or in a condition of interpretative uncertainty over the work. This is what happens in Mis-love, where the artist upends the idea of the domestic houseplant as an emblem of house pride. Plants, in fact, represent a recurring positive stereotype in home furnishing magazines, in the cinema and in publicity campaigns. But at the same time, plants testify to the love of green that has recently been gaining great attention, perhaps because of the dramatic environmental problems that are a feature of our times. In her installation – consisting of some ten elements – Pugno alters radically the way in which plants are presented to the spectator, filling the spaces between the branches and leaves with polyurethane foam. These are unexpected, brutal concretions that violate the supposed natural “status” of the vegetation, rendering it inorganic, disquieting and monstrous – they are produced, in fact, industrially with high ecological impact. Yet that condition – to which the plant will react rapidly, developing alternative growth and survival paths – speaks desperately of mankind which finds itself in a contradictory condition, torn by a declared desire for nature at every stage, and an ideological opposition to many of the phenomena that nature itself implies, such as old age, illness, death and respect for process times. Mis-love thus displays openly our ambiguity, our incapacity to act coherently with those same premises that we proclaim. It shows the limits and ambiguity of our vision and judgment.

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The starting point of Iva Lulashi’s painting is frequently a video frame. The artists, after completing a web search with some of the words she loves to investigate, chooses an image she feels suitable to set in motion a pictorial process. The frame functions as a spiral on reality and. precisely because of its vagueness and even its ambiguity, it leaves an open space on which the painting can act. It is a method to which the artist adheres very consistently and it is at the root of the work, Sweet flagrum, which she has created especially for Libere tutte. It is a considerably larger oil painting than usual for Lulashi, as is suggested by the other two paintings exhibited. The woman’s body, swallowed up by an apparently voracious nature, is a work of great quality and pictorial intensity, in which the paint is spread like a stain to provide a dramatic tension intrinsic to the technical process. The work thus expresses a double, contrasting, drive. On the one hand, it maintains a sense of distance, physical and temporal, provided by the muted tone of the painting. On the other hand, it expresses a dimension of imminence, of urgency that reflects the situations examined. Even the female figure of Sweet flagrum is subjected to this double tension which pushes her from the surrounding tangle of vegetation and bounces her to the surface of the canvas. The space freed by the vagueness of the frame thereby becomes a field in which painting can operate, extending immeasurably the spectrum of ambiguity.

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The final room opens on a large work by Samorì. It is a crasis of two paintings by Simone Cantarini and Giorgio Vasari, depicting a Resurrezione (Resurrection) in the lower part and an Immacolata Concezione (Immaculate Conception) in the upper part, which is the part most compromised and marked by the creative process. The notable symmetry of the corrosion has been obtained, in fact, by folding the fresh canvas in on itself, along the vertical axis, inserting order into the chaos of the stain. An element of abstract materiality in form, but concrete in genesis, is associated with and accentuates the immateriality and concreteness of the episodes being evoked. Here Matteo Fato presents his most recent works: they are chromatic florilegia of great lightness and poignancy. In a cataloguing process similar to the monochrome canvases of the previous room, these canvases have the function of summarising the artist’s creative history, going back over the lines it has traced through the years and sampling its colours. It retrospectively recalls the creative process of the work, often already declared to be in progress, like the cleaning of the used brushes that flank Flaiano’s portrait in the veranda or cover the book at the foot of the easel in the living room.

PH MICHELE ALBERTO SERENI

PH MICHELE ALBERTO SERENI

PH MICHELE ALBERTO SERENI

PH MICHELE ALBERTO SERENI

PH MICHELE ALBERTO SERENI

PH MICHELE ALBERTO SERENI

PH MICHELE ALBERTO SERENI

PH MICHELE ALBERTO SERENI

THE ARTWORKS

Nicola Samorì, Miriade, 2018, oil on linen, Courtesy EIGEN+ART, Berlin/Leipzig

Matteo Fato, Florilegio (2), 2018 approx., oil on linen, plywood transport box, Courtesy of the Artist and Galleria Michela Rizzo, Venice

Matteo Fato, Florilegio (3), circa 2018, oil on linen, plywood shipping crate, Courtesy of the Artist and Galleria Michela Rizzo, Venice

Entrance: Matteo Fato, Senza titolo (libro), 2014, Catalogue of Ca’ dei Ricchi, glued with oil pigment preparation on book, pedestal in plywood, MDF and mirror, Private collection