Curated by Valerio Dehò

December 16, 2012 - February 9, 2013

The magical aspect of art is part of its ability to make true what is not, but also in knowing how to represent the invisible and the immaterial. Perhaps there is no longer any space for Aesthetics of form, but artists like Francesco Bocchini still know how to find the right ideas to render through works, hidden, strange, magical universes.
These recent works are dedicated to magicians and illusionists, categories often confined to the cauldron of the esoteric and cultural by-products. But there are also situations in which magic has been able to create something that man deeply needs, the idea that there is a parallel reality to the usual, ordinary, banal one. Discovering the future, knowing how to look beyond reality, and discovering links between the visible and the invisible gives the strength not to surrender to the routine of life or to media illusions. Bocchini's recent works on magicians, conjurers and illusionists arouse the artist's interest in lists, catalogues, and inventories and at the same time, contrast is created with the subjects and their arts of the magic of transformation of actually into something else.
Bocchini's celibate machines have also undergone a change: in this case, the mechanisms are increasingly visible and are brought to the fore. The noisy iron structure remains classic, but we certainly are dealing with mechanical organs that move not only creating a kinetic work but also feeding the gaze of shapes and illusions. The magicians are evoked, as well as by their names written on the coloured sheets, by the gestures and movements of the celibate machines that take up the art of conjuring hands that are faster than the eyes as symbols (doves, wands, coloured stripes,. ..) and which are part of the baggage of an ancient trade. The magic in these works is something that has to do with not resigning oneself to the banality of everyday life and illusion, often simple and direct, which reveals everyone's need to believe in the impossible.
Another typical element of Francesco Bocchini's works is the display cases, real glass and sheet metal containers, which contain objects, worlds and flowers. Also in this case the attention to classification and inventory comes out. In this case, the installation becomes a sort of museum of lost globes, a warehouse of abandoned globes. The size of the work and the accumulation of similar globes, but never exactly identical, give the idea of ​​possible worlds and consider the earth as something unique but also replicable. Bocchini accumulates, like the "Nouveau realists", but offers a meaning to this accumulation and makes it become the image of today's world, always too full of the same and multiplied objects, but which on closer inspection are different and, perhaps, unique.