Verticale terra

About

Fabrizio Prevedello / Michele Tocca

Verticale terra

curated by Davide Ferri

Opening days:
Friday, 23 & Saturday, 24 April| h. 1-7 pm
April 23 > June 5, 2021

Verticale terra features works by Fabrizio Prevedello and Michele Tocca. Not a double solo show, this dialogue between different poetics runs along a single story narrated through the gallery’s three rooms that provides common ground for the two artists’ forms of expression: Prevedello’s sculpture and Tocca’s painting and is based on the perspectives and movements of the gaze fostered by their works, on one hand, and certain vaguely recurring themes, on the other.

Prevedello develops his ideas through his materials of preference—plaster, and different varieties of marble but also slate, onyx—found and carted off during his wanders in the Apuan Alps, his chosen place of residence and perennial source of inspiration. Many of his sculptures arise from fragments of places he has traversed, which when combined, assembled or enclosed in structures made with common building materials like reinforced concrete and iron (through workman’s gestures wrought in myriad ways) give life to three-dimensional composite shapes. While leaving options open for the possibility of an inside, an underside or a backside, very often his works do not emerge far from the wall, in this way offering a privileged vantage point to the viewer, together with surfaces and fields capable of expanding a landscape’s character in space or the messages coming from different panoramas as devices capable of reconfiguring and reinventing one’s view of a location.

Tocca’s works seem instead derived from a minimalist view of the ordinary, things happened upon during a stroll or inside a domestic environment, set aside in marginal spaces, of which every painting is a portrait, a translation of the thing’s ‘here and now” based on the process of taking measure of the visual appearance and the atmosphere of the live, the living. Tocca’s canvases can thus coincide with landscape and landscape painting while alluding to history’s unescapable suggestions (vedute, in particular, as well as a certain school of travel painting) or paintings with the image of an object that once painted on an undefined plane preserves the marks of time and surroundings in the folds and imperfections of its surface. The subjects of Tocca’s paintings draw the observer into a first-hand, close-up view, directing it downward or upward (or toward a horizon line grazing the painting’s upper edge) and are repeated in series with minimal variations of light and nuance that give the painting their overall tone and tenor.

Verticale terra is an exhibition of surfaces: hard and sharp here, dusty and hazy there, a dialogue between fields—the range of whites, grays, and blacks of Prevedello’s marbles and the earthy yellows, grays, and browns on Tocca’s palette—that may take on the appearance of a match-up or a musical score in which different tones are triggered and instigate one another in turn.

Tocca and Prevedello’s works also share certain aspects of formal nature: the tendency of both to construct images that develop around a tightly plotted foreground seen from up close with slight traces of depth in constant balance and contrast with the tactility of the surface.

Verticale terra also alludes to a movement in the way the works have been laid out: from the idea of a landscape revealed in vertical, ascent, and upward progression, and a descent to the horizontal (particularly in the works in the final room) and the ground at your feet, the destination of the dialogue between Michele Tocca and Fabrizio Prevedello.

Davide Ferri

Verticale terra
Fabrizio Prevedello / Michele Tocca
curated by Davide Ferri
Opening days: Friday, 23 & Saturday, 24 April, h. 1-7 pm
Duration: 23 April > 5 June, 2021
Location: z2o Sara Zanin, Via della Vetrina 21, Rome
Gallery opening hours: Mon-Sat, 1-7 pm (or by appointment)
For info: info@z2ogalleria.it / www.z2ogalleria.it