PAREIDOLIA by STEFANO IRACI

Exhibition curated by Tanja Lelgemann

25 November to 18 December 2016

 

Opening 24 November 2016, 6pm

 

 

 
In the field of neuroscience, pareidolia is an ancestral human reflex that causes us to recognise faces or forms with a familiar meaning in randomly-shaped objects or outlines, based on our instinct and need to identify them as rapidly as possible, almost unconsciously.
Stefano Iraci’s pictorial language draws on multi-cultural primordial and hypermodern influences. A little like Rorschach tests, his black forms on flat fields of colour suggest the presence of continually transforming figures and stories, because painting, like music, gives the imagination free reign to travel between infinite and ever-evolving interpretations. So his works inspire a mental process of reflection and meditation: once freed from the need for semantic decoding, viewers can lose themselves in the creative vacuum of chromatic contemplation.

Stefano Iraci portrays the contemporary awareness of great environmental and social shifts without fear or reserve. He was born in Rome in 1959, and continues to live and work in the city. Iraci has a strong background in the human sciences in addition to his artistic training. The human body is a key subject in his work, and one that he studied in depth by attending classes in anatomy and other subjects at medical schools, before obtaining a doctorate in epithelial biology. Since 1998, he has shown his works in various European cities at private galleries (Abraço Gallery/Lisbon, Frank Pagès Gallery/Baden Baden) public institutions (Italian Cultural Institute, Brussels, European Commission Berlaymont Building, Brussels, MACRO Rome, MAXXI Rome, Auditorium Parco della Musica, Rome…) and private collections.

OBJECTS abstractions, tools, systems, drawings

Claudio Cintoli – Luigi Di Sarro – Ettore Innocente

curated by Carlotta Sylos Calò

20 October – 18 November 2016

In 60’s and 70’s the aesthetic operation ‘opens up’ to involve space, environment and the tissue of history and relationships where it was born, breaking the borders of the visual and becoming experience. Oggetti/Objects – produced and hosted by Centro Luigi Di Sarro (20 October – 18 November 2016) and curated by Carlotta Sylos Calò – shows works by Claudio Cintoli (1935-1978), Luigi Di Sarro (1941-1979) and Ettore Innocente (1934-1987), similar to abstractions, tools, systems and drawings. The exhibition offers a reading of the wide topic of the object (understood as a matrix, model or schema) in the imaginative dimension of 70’s in Italy, marked by a tendency to design that combines utopia and practice.

img_3799-2di-sarro-scultura-in-fil-di-ferro-1969-caimg_4362_innocente

Claudio Cintoli, Cucchiai del firmamento, 1968; Luigi Di Sarro, Senza titolo, 1969; Ettore Innocente, Dove gira l’infinito, 1976

The event is linked with the Festival of the Seventies (in October 2016, various locations), promoted by the Catholic University of Milan, University of Parma and La Sapienza University of Rome, in conjunction with the International Conference Arte fuori dall’arte (by Cristina Casero, Elena Di Raddo, Francesca Gallo), on 12th and 13th October, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan

The Illusion of Daedalus – Mary Cinque

Painting as a reinvented space, which loses its Newtonian definition, to rise as a thought, this is the subtitle of the show, curated by Massimo Bignardi, at the Centro Di Sarro from September 22nd to October 15th 2016.

opening: September 22nd, 6.00 pm

Mary Cinque was born in 1979 in Naples, where she lives and works. This is her first solo show in Rome and exhibits a series of medium and large paintings on canvas.

“As Merleau-Ponty wrote you can’t ‘do an exhaustive inventory of the visible’ and this is the assumption that pushes the painting, whether figurative or abstract, to celebrate the mystery of the ‘visibility’. For Mary Cinque, the city is the painting ideal accomplice in its fate to celebrate the enigma of visibility. This is very clear in this cycle of paintings dedicated to urban views, a recurring theme in her work, which she address to on canvas, paper or  wooden table depicting the dimension of space as well as the dimension of the place. Essentially the artist tears away from Daedalus, mythological guardian of the arts of architecture and sculpture, the illusory certainty of space assigning it to the timelessness of the image. She does it by reducing the volumes to flat color in which architecture, the whole city, loses its Newtonian definition to rise to an amalgam of time, memory and, thus,  future. Painting becomes in this sense another actual place, full of narrative value that is typical of those who try to tell the being in her own time”. (Massimo Bignardi)

Event organized during the Giornata del Comporaneo promoted by Amaci

        

 

Eva Macali – FACCIONI

curated by Roberto Gramiccia

opening: thursday 16 june 2016 6pm

(the show runs till 9 july)

 

FACCIONI, in italian means large faces, but also means the big poster on the road. So in this way, FACCIONI are images of women made object from advertising. The Eva Macali’s show offers an overturns of the hierarchical relationship between the observer and the observed. “One of my goals – says the artist – is that the women I represent can receive their subjectivity back. … My trial intervenes between the codes of modern painting, photography and the media; It is generally linked to the broader theme of the iconography “. Roberto Gramiccia writes in the text “I Faccioni, the looks, the question” that accompanies the exhibition: …  Eva Macali’s FACCIONI are in the tradition, but also outside of the traditional (…) made by an energetic gazelle post-pop, and that’s is also a natural anti-pop for an artist who has to dial with a Mediterranean culture. A culture that for thousands of years, rather than giving answers, he prefers to give questions. The same questions arising from the crossed eyes of FACCIONI showed at Centro Di Sarro. A question is in every glance. And in that question is the deeper meaning of life”.

 

 

COLONIAL GHOSTS – Zwelethu Machepha

Curated by EMMA VANDERMERWE

Colonial Ghosts at the Centro Di Sarro brings together the different mediums of drawing, painting and printmaking of the young South African artist Zwelethu Machepha. Machepha capturing  enthusiastically in both figurative and abstracted the intrinsic and intuitive histories and languages of a world around him. A pixilated and redefined language that is both simultaneously a commentary on the digitalized world around us but equally meticulous colors and patterns that could equate with his cultural heritage.

Most recent prints include the subtler elements of pure fluorescent white drawings on paper that contrasts with the larger scale multi-paneled monochrome and colorful paper works. These all explain the process of experimentation the artist works through. Originally based on literal renderings of his human subjects  (an example has been included in this exhibition as well), the essence of this humanity permeates through the exhibition. But as the artist moves forward in time the visual references are pared down to their abstracted ‘essence’. Responding to the vibrant urban spaces around him as one moves from room to room one can feel the presence of a human beings, as they gradually lose recognizable forms. Machepha explains he is trying to capture his identity  and his world as the global environment around us continues to accelerate to such a degree we lose all grounding and roots with what we know. The audience is able to experience this fractured nature in the drawings depending on how close you are to them. From across the room one can see the silhouettes of the forms and bodies, whilst up very close the identities and shapes lose all definition and become only intense lines and patterns.

Machepha includes near the end of the exhibition a small series of brand new oil paint etchings realized in Rome with the assistance of Alessandro Fornaci at Stamperia del Tevere. Recaptured here the nuisances of humanity but without the recognizable human form. This minimal narrative by Machepha touches upon a dissolving of identities and loss of figuration now is landscaped in Roman languages that impressed upon the artist in his residency.   (Emma Vandermerwe – Everard Read Gallery Cape Town)

see all the images on the  ARP INSTAGRAM DIARY

MOSTRE: Nature- Mădălin Ciucă – Nicola Rossini- 4 – 26 maggio 2016, inaugurazione mercoledì 4 maggio 2016 ore 18

Il Centro Luigi Di Sarro presenta la mostra Nature a cura di Paola Ballesi.

Nature vede protagonisti i due artisti Mădălin Ciucă – Nicola Rossini, l’uno rumeno, diplomato all’Accademia di Belle Arti di Cluj-Napoca, si è specializzato in Italia presso l’Accademia di Belle Arti di Macerata, l’altro, bresciano di nascita, si è diplomato all’Accademia di Firenze, dove attualmente vive e prosegue gli studi per conseguire il diploma specialistico di scultura, ma ha già all’attivo importanti riconoscimenti.

La pittura di Mădălin Ciucă, da sempre concentrato sul tema del ritratto, cavalca le superfici, moltiplica le luci e le ombre attraverso lo spettro delle tonalità percettive con cui inquadra e contemporaneamente disgrega tanto il profilo di un volto quanto quello di una montagna.

Nicola Rossini impronta la sua ricerca di una particolare venatura scientifica soprattutto rivolta allo studio dei materiali, ferro, marmo, pietra, terre e alle loro sottili interferenze ed inferenze. Fin dai primi lavori porta avanti una investigazione puntuale sui processi di ossidazione mettendone in luce i risultati dal punto di vista formale apprezzando anche le più microscopiche varianze cromatiche e tonali che registra come rapporti di forze che si contendono la materia.

I due artisti sono vicini nell’approccio al percorso di ricerca che hanno intrapreso, caratterizzato da una forte matrice etica che permea la loro pratica artistica quotidiana sfidando le lusinghe che vengono dai facilitatori che vorrebbero l’arte ridotta a spot, a evento mediatico, a pura trovata. Entrambi infatti hanno maturato la consapevolezza che l’arte è continua difficile conquista e spesa di sé perché l’artista ogni volta si rimette in gioco per ricominciare daccapo, coniugando tecnica e invenzione in un’avventura impervia e senza fine.

MOSTRE: Nature- Mădălin Ciucă - Nicola Rossini- 4 - 26 maggio 2016, inaugurazione mercoledì 4 maggio 2016 ore 18
Nature- Mădălin Ciucă – Nicola Rossini- 4 – 26 maggio 2016