Cross Breeze

About

The liminal aspects that concern not only reality in its troublesome complexity but especially the articulated society in which we live, are usually those that have the most impact and are able to cut flesh in the broadest sense, delving deeply into the abyss of the tangible. 

Their movement is transversal and is as clean as it is soft and acute, it creeps into the most imperceptible interstices of feeling, filling with meaning what is stale, codified, repetitive, indolent and monotonous. 

More than a fight, more than a ferocious cut, it is a subtle existence and persistence of the threadlike membranes of beauty that blow intertwined with mere custom. At the same time, motionless and flowing like a gentle breeze, they leave lapilli which mark their passage, decanting their very presence and shining according to their respective morphologies. 

Poised between monstrosity and delicacy, implacability and hint, chromatic jolt and Arcadian references, these forms expose their transversality as a symbol of nonchalance and truth. 

As roots of meaning, they exalt both the figurative and abstract rudiments of being, weapons of plants and simulacra of resistance that expose both pictorial and sculptural matter to become the subject of ethical and political investigation, dissecting the ambiguity of reality and praising it is impossible to give up uniqueness.

It is thus that, riding the mythological Balio and Xanto, the two immortal horses born from the west wind Zefiro, each following its own and peculiar orientation, all the works on display whisper the corresponding distinctive trait with sometimes voiceless and sometimes high-pitched voices.

Beatrice Alici is an emerging Italian artist. Her artistic research is linked to the theme of Eden, in the sense of a timeless archaic place, consisting of nocturnal scenes in which figures and natural landscapes merge into each other, in an attempt to represent a return to a primordial psychological space. The figures that most frequently populate his imagery of her are female, who are depicted with enigmatic or supernatural elements. Depicted as goddesses or witches, they evoke a divine matriarchy: the sacred and primordial feminine. The use of nocturnal moonlight is a further symbolic suggestion to the sphere of the feminine, in fact, in contrast to the masculine sunlight, it makes the scenes depicted more delicate and with cool, almost silvery tones. Thus, images emerge of an inner world of the artist far removed from reality, characterized by references to the magical and surreal.

Maddalena Tesser states that «an artist’s view of art cannot be static. Art outlives the artist; therefore, the artist must always be in flux, free to change their visual language and their technical approach, yet always remaining true to their inner convictions and modes of self-expression. On a subjective level, my paintings originate from within a reimagined world in which the sprawling tentacles of patriarchy never existed, free for all types of femininity to flourish. My work highlights an impossible reality, an ideal/ae- sthetic escape in both form and color, one where the means of both are free to find expression not only in my voice, but also in the voices of the impossibly real subjects themselves. In order to create my works, my artistic practice revolves around framing the best narrative to depict. A broken seashell found on the beach, the reproduction of an obscure print in a restaurant, the openness to see and collect images: this allows me to form compositions of figures, objects, and landscapes – mainly with fragments of photos from different historical, social, and cultural fields - which I carefully select with an instinctive awareness in telling the stories I want to tell. From this jumping-off point, pictorial images are woven into a tapestry in which the use value of the work (practical methodology) is far exceeded by its evocati- ve exchange value derived from its interest in the disparities that appear while rethinking, reinventing, and readjusting values that materialize within my new, created, safe “realities” ».

Giuditta Branconi: Vivid, emblematic of delicate and flourishing beauty, with a purely feminine flavor, with a resolutely strong-willed and idyllic character, full of interior monologues, those typical of the so-called stream of consciousness, the work of the very young artist, originally from Abruzzo and Milanese by adoption, This is how Giuditta Branconi, born in 1998, presents herself to our eyes. With the main objective of connecting with the surrounding terrestrial globe, not excluding its dichotomous aspect, Branconi's vibrant research first appropriates modern symbols, images and icons to then create new and astonishing, very personal visions, composed of elements both angelic and lascivious and dreamy and disturbing. Branconi's swirling and strongly identifying painting is a real mise en scène in which the characters, undisputed protagonists, often surrounded by rare plant species and a rich fauna, whirl around, enveloping and hovering harmoniously, becoming ever more ineffably unstoppable.

John Sachpazis: «drawing on my personal experiences as a transfeminine person (she/her) and my background in photography, I seek to explore the materiality and becoming of the queer and trans body, through concepts such as trauma, embodied memory, affect, monstrosity and post-humanism. I focus on visual and sensory explorations between photography, sculpture and painting, creating post-Frankenstein figures inspired by Susan Stryker’s work on performing transgender rage. I am considering these artworks as some kind of re-claimed post-Frankenstein monsters. Using the monster as a metaphor for the Trans* experience, my work aims to highlight and transform the marginalized affective discomfort gender-queer people often experience within normative patriarchal environments. The ‘monstrous’ – as an ode to the monster – becomes a tool of resistance against social norms that reproduce bodily identities according to agelong heteronormal and cisnormal dichotomies. I use references from surgery as symbolic rituals of becoming – a “panta rhei”. Surgical wounds transcend into gateway holes that mirror queer trauma: our leaks and flows, a “failure” to be normal. They invite inquiry into the chaotic unknown. I seek to provoke a view that is located neither at the inside nor the outside, neither as part of the self nor of the other. We become at a dynamic and ambivalent in-betweenness. May the viewer of my work truly embrace this affective and sensory condition».

Holly Halkes’s paintings engage with the values of the carnivalesque circulating around themes of free interaction, breaking down barriers and playing on eccentric behaviours through her own experiences of what it feels like to live in the 21st Century. Halkes is interested in creating an alternate social space characterised by freedom and abundance to explore human behaviours and social interactions that border between real life and fantasy. The work often centres around humour and the relationship we have with it to question self- identity and the bodies we live in. This is often seen through the artist’s gusto in the way paint is applied which allows for fun moments and ribald laughter. In the paintings we often see timeless veritable tragicomedies: chaotic and brilliant food- fights where time and space are suspended, almost crystallised in the gesture of a hand trying to grasp the elusive. Everything remains frozen and out of date, we can look but not touch, desire but not grasp. Beneath the glossy surface, reminiscent of the sterile sheen of the digital images that populate our lives, hovers a sense of loneliness and grotesqueness. The ridicule that permeates the artist's visual narrative tells us all about our conflicts and our search for identity and freedom beyond our vulnerabilities and anxieties. Underneath the surface the paintings touch upon internal and external conflicts of sense of self and the whirlwind times that we are currently living in.

Diane Chappalley's work explores themes of love and death through a rich palette of fleshy and earthly tones. The human figures are painted in grey or neutral colours, as if carved from stone; statues lost in time. Surrounded by flowers in their state of becoming, the body of work is a proposition of what once was, what is, and what can become. Both death and creation appear to occupy a liminal space between dreamlike mysticism and tangible earthiness. Living things emerge from and also disappear back into the landscapes, suggesting a cycle of life and death that draws vivid parallels between tomb and womb as sites of creativity.