So close, come on
20th October – 18th November 2023
The exhibition “So close, come on” brings together the work of five international artists. Starting from the point of the pictorial origin, where the colour has a fundamental role in their research, they embrace new discourses through different representations from diagrams, shapes and transparencies, using the frames as references and allowing us to glimpse the signs of the digitization.
Upon entering the room we find “Giving the eye what it wants” by Julián Caridi (1994, Colombia), a pictorial work with refined symbolism, using color intuitively to let the pigments and the shape speak for themselves. Furthermore, the titles of his works come from his written poetry, which evolves alongside the artwork, making each title an entity in its own right. In contrast, we find the painting on movement “Will technology save us?” Stefania Zocco (1980, Italy) where the daily digital journey of our fingers on our screen seems like an ancestral ritual over a precious conglomerate of minerals, which we can no longer do without. That same abstract movement ceases to be abstract when encountering the brushstrokes converted into brushes in the work of Antonia Rodrian (1990, Germany), in a painting where sometimes the objects become shapes and fields of color, the represented structures are transformed into abstract lines and repetitions of shapes accentuate the formal structure. Paint as a material and the placement of color are as important as the content displayed: they are committed and intertwined with each other.
We can see those limits that pictorial works encapsulate in the work of Selma Parlour (1976, South Africa), whose interest lies in the creation of paintings that are effectively diagrams or templates. The illusion is encoded through shaded bands and the color is embedded through a marquetry process, where we can see the confines between some frames and others that are found together with the color, within the canvas. Also within the metal frame is the work of Maria Appleton (1997, Portugal), who is interested in the continuous investigation of color and form developed through multiple treatment, weaving, and engraving techniques, “Coding III” unfolds as a chromatic impression on a juxtaposition of layers of cotton, silk and other industrial fabrics that contribute to defining a series of vibrant abstract transparencies. The exhibition ends with the work of Stefania Zocco where again that digitalized movement that we generate from the movement of our fingers on the screen is transferred to the canvas, once again recreating a sensation of visual movement.