Erika Verzutti. Ex Gurus

About

Erika Verzutti’s works explore the ways in which the insular act of creation becomes intertwined with the physical world. Drawing on both the natural and artificial, Verzutti’s sculptures and reliefs evoke equally the familiar forms they represent, as well as the abstract results of material exploration. Incorporating these once fleeting gestures into their final form, the works remain firmly rooted within a studio practice and have an intimate relationship to their own history, demonstrating the continuously evolving relationship between ideation and process.

For her first exhibition with the gallery, Verzutti incorporates her own biography as a material in a series of wall reliefs and floor-based sculptures. Rather than working from life or photographs, each work begins with an abstract concept. These Ex Gurus draw on ideas and belief systems once formative to Verzutti’s own thinking that have since been abandoned. Made apparent by the work’s titles, they range from the cosmological to the mundane; all acting as a framework through which to explore the tension between representation and abstraction, and how one can lead into the other.

The relationship between these two poles also gives way to a complex relationship between painting and sculpture. In wall reliefs such as Homeopatia, 2018, sculptural depressions into the bronze surface become guidelines for the application of colored paints. Alternatively, in works such as Astrology, painting is what transforms the surface’s gridded structure into an image to be deciphered by the viewer. These strategies continue throughout the works in the exhibition and form an inquiry that is similar to synesthesia, or the process in which one form or experience cognitively can become another. Simultaneously physical, conceptual, and formal, Verzutti’s work suggests that the act of creation is in itself a belief system, one with the freedom to endlessly discover new ideas and results.