INTEMPORALE

INTEMPORALE 

Essay by Carlo Sala

The title of the exhibition, Intemporale, refers to a suspended dimension, not tied to a univocal moment, thus drawing attention to a series of researches that, in order to problematize the present, refer to memory, history, and the reinterpretation of the past, but also to the painting understood as an articulated 'container' where reflections, cross-references and the feeling of different times can coexist. As written by the great French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, images are "overdetermined objects" where "a montage of heterogeneous times" coexists, connecting to inhomogeneous meditations and stylings capable of expressing a complexity through the visual datum. The exhibition places in dialogue the work of five authors represented by Prometeo Gallery - Fabrizio Cotognini (Macerata, 1983), Iva Lulashi (Tirana, 1988), Rosanna Rossi (Cagliari, 1937), Giuseppe Stampone (Cluses, 1974) and Zehra Doğan (Diyarbakir, 1989) - with that of five emerging artists working through painting and drawing: Nicola Bertolo (Vicenza, 1996), Nuvola Camera (Como, 1998), Silvia Capuzzo (Merano, 1996), Simon Pellegrini (Bergamo, 1997) and Aronne Pleuteri (Erba, 2001). 

In some artists there is a direct reference to the past, as in Fabrizio Cotognini, who reworks in a contemporary key a wide corollary of classical images that are layered with words and signs, harmonizing apparently inhomogeneous instances. A series of quotations from art history appear in Giuseppe Stampone's sign universe, which, through the transposition accomplished by the artist, take on socio-political implications and place themselves in dialogue with a series of icons emblematic of the moment we are living. In Zehra Doğan and Iva Lulashi, on the other hand, the theme of memory is central: for the former, all the main figures of her works embody the tensions, libertarian and identity instances of the Kurdish people to whom her biographical story is closely linked; while the latter poses a pictorial research that merges, and sediments, some specific elements of the imaginary of her homeland, Albania, with the urgencies of her daily life in an overlap between private and collective memory; finally, in Rosanna Rossi's works there are no tangible references to narrative elements, but all human knowledge and possible realities are traced back by the author to her own geometric visual alphabet made of colors, lines, chromaticisms and surfaces, and placed at the disposal of the viewer's perception.

Among the emerging authors hosted by the gallery, Nuvola Camera makes paintings where the narrated elements take on a timeless dimension, in which their features are fleshed out, relativized, open to a sense of uncertainty that leads them to new and unexpected meanings; Simon Pellegrini's drawings are also played on essentiality and are the result of stories that change with time, where an event merges (and blurs) with dreams, suggestions and thoughts. Silvia Capuzzo's works convey a sense of impermanence - of the pictorial magma - that deliberately prevents a crystal-clear and limpid vision of the image and, on the contrary, tickles the viewer's gaze that compulses its own perception and exegesis. Aronne Pleuteri's paintings relate to the history of painting by denying some aspects of its tradition - such as the iconicity of the figure - deemed inexpressible by the artist: this is why his scenarios are made of fragmentary and mutilated elements that deny the usual visual topoi of representation. Instead, Nicola Bertolo populates his canvases with a polyphony of characters (derived as much from the iconography of manga and anime as from classical paintings such as Francisco Goya's The Parasol) - at times alien to the context - who come from different times and worlds, but all in search of their own habitat.