Correnti IV - Sublimare

About

RITA URSO artopiagallery is pleased to present Correnti IV - Sublimare, a group exhibition featuring the artists Niamh O’Malley (1975, Ireland), Namsal Siedlecki (1986, USA) and Alessandro Vizzini (1985, Italy), curated by Roberto Lacarbonara.
Correnti IV was conceived as the fourth exhibition act within the project Correnti - envisioned by Giulia Bortoluzzi - which, since September 2022, involved the artists Ella Littwitz and Elena Mazzi in the exhibition Correnti I - Animalia (September-November 2022), Marzena Nowak in the solo show Correnti II - Blue (December 2022-February 2023) and the artists Eva L’Hoest and Mario Sironi in the dialogue Correnti III - Techne (March-May 2023).
The title of this last exhibition episode, Sublimare, delves into the concept of correnti with a psychic, perceptual and energetic lens. Changes of state, transfigurations and metamorphoses, linguistic shifts and visual, sensitive, and formal migrations: these are all the phenomena and aspects regarding sublimation, a term which, in the dual meaning of physics and psychoanalysis, defines a model of transformation of matter and spirit.
In the works of the three artists on display, each sculptural and object element is captured in its “evolutionary state”, in its renewal process. We witness moments of transition and changes: when things and stories cease to exist to become pure form, solid presence, visible synthesis of invisible forces.
 

Le Sorgenti (2021) by Alessandro Vizzini are architectures conceived starting from the hollow, negative, and empty space that flows between the vertical layers of the sculpture, so to render the idea of air passage that fosters and agitates spaces from within, like a soul that crosses the matter and vivifies it. Instead, the optical-perceptual processes are the ones that let the elements of the natural landscape find a formal break, a plastic configuration in sculptural objects processed both with primary materials and techniques - wood, earth, clay - both with design solutions - polyurethane, resins, paints.
 

The objets trouvés with which Niamh O’Malley works on her sculptural assemblages come from urban and industrial contexts. The Irish artist investigates the perceptual differences that materials impose on a slow and thorough observation. Glass is the privileged material of her three-dimensional still lifes and contributes to activating different modes of vision: opaque, transparent, or reflective. This material leads the observer’s gaze toward the surface or beyond its luminous, chromatic, plastic filter.

An archaic window, conceived by Namsal Siedlecki, created through the fusion of glass and wolf ashes, becomes the threshold device that, acting as in Limes (2017), defines the boundary between subject and object, between nature and culture, between man and animal, in that thin transparent interstice in which is played the relationship of inclusion and exclusion that is at the base of every civilization (like the Roman one, to which the work alludes). But this exchange, this flow through the boundaries, is also an act that creates and dismantles the body matter, as it happens to the couple in Viandanti (2020), a mold of two ex-votos casts in zinc and subjected to an incessant process of electrolyte exchange; or as in Deposizione (2020) in which the calcite sediments that embed a canvas, long left in the water of a “petrifying fountain”, seem to associate the genesis of sculpture to the millennial phenomena of geology.