Inauguration: Saturday 11 March 2017, 6 pm

12 March - 30 April 2017

(to) bite into literally means “to sink one's teeth” and “to attack”, “to attack”.
Ice Shelf is the floating ice shelf, otherwise known as an ice barrier, which forms where a glacier, at the coast, slides to the surface of the ocean.

Martino Genchi sinks his teeth into this pure white barrier, container of light, but also arid and polar. He sinks his teeth to break through and discover that under that glacial limit, life, similar and alien at the same time, is kept hidden. Down there lives the unheimlich, the uncanny, familiar and alien that attracts and repels us. The artist collects the creatures of this ghostly and magnificent world and projects them into an environment where the view is no longer obstructed, returning them to us, as is bound to happen, transfigured by his gaze. They are the Linger, car headlights that cross the space solidifying it in the form of synthetic plaster sculptures. Their meaning lies in the use that the artist makes of them, or traces that depart from the here and now to propagate in space-time according to unpredictable courses. Do not make the mistake of considering here and now a starting point, nor a point of arrival. It is only the point of contact, visible and therefore knowable, a stable and evolving core that allows us to read the time that has deposited, freezing layer by layer, and which returns it to us in the solid form of the territory of our present. . We penetrate the complexity of this landscape with Drawings, geometric drawings that the artist performs by pushing the calculation capacity of his computer to the limit through the exponential multiplication of the number of lines. Martino Genchi's works are emblematic of a relationship between vitality and abstraction which is in the first instance information on the modal construction of identity, defined in the dialogue with the otherness of the environment, models and symbolic constructions.

How the similar and the dissimilar nuance in otherness is transfigured in the Master Stones. Reacting empathically, we recognize the 'stone' material in them even before knowing that we are faced with the sculptural and abstract echo of a fragment of existing. The ambiguous form, extracted from amorphous substance, solidified and smoothed, is a real that preserves a proportion with what originally exists, the master stone kept at the Medieval Museum of Bologna. Is the doubt legitimate, idem or alter? Alter. That alter that, unstoppable, takes on an animal-like appearance when it is innervated in Timegraft, metal plates physically linked to the space with tie rods and at the same time kept in suspension. Each slab, which at first sight appears to be a pure, abstract and volumeless form is a device that contemplates and through which we contemplate the territory of time.

The fundamental data obtained paraphrases our link with the environment, which is expressed in the actions of doing and observing. Man is animated by an unstoppable impulse to do that is as scary and fascinating as the sublime world we have built. Every object produced, just like every work of art, has a life of its own and asks to be contemplated as well as acted upon. Every trace of Martino Genchi bites. It is an exhortation to become observers in order to make a difference, sinking your teeth to open a gap and see (beyond) the material trace of space-time.

Elsa Barbieri