Curated by Viana Conti

January 17 - February 21, 2015

The 2014 exhibition year ended, for the gallery, opening itself to the historical reconsideration of the artist Claudio Costa, on display with a selection of magical-anthropological works, presented by Flaminio Gualdoni with the book In the Materials of Human, il canneto editore . The 2015 exhibition year begins on Saturday 17 January, at 6 pm, with the site specific personal exhibition by Cristina Treppo (Udine 1968) significantly entitled Piombo and the intervention, in the space on the first floor, by Luca Clabot (Venice 1966) , edited by Viana Conti. If a dialogue is established between Clabot's puns, assonances, anagrams, verb-phonetic-visual-scriptural witticisms and the finding of a settlement, seductive as a petrified fossil forest, of Treppo, it is that of a witty Esprit de finesse of the first and of a leaden Melancholia, of vague Saturnian sign, of the second.

Cristina Treppo. The choice of the title Piombo can be traced back, perceptively and phenomenologically, to a condition, material and immaterial, of weight, dominant color, stratification of memories, traces, footprints, which emerge in the minimal setting of objects, subjects, sensations, which do not allow to the eye, but they deeply touch the mind, the psyche, the sensory suggestions, the unconscious associations, the intra and extrapersonal remembrance faculties of the observer. The entrance to Cristina Treppo's exhibition space, strewn with casts of tubes, urns, cushions, boxes of drugs drowned in concrete, tiles with faint inscriptions of decorations referring to Middle Eastern cultures, a circle of concrete bottles, connected by a copper belt, full of Morandian resonances and childhood memories, it conveys the emotion of the discovery of a deposit of artifacts, of an archaeological site buried, over time, by ashes and dust, lava flows and pumice, such as after a sudden volcanic eruption. His poetics, with a Bachelardian connotation, stems from the tension that is established, in his object installations, conceived for a hypothetical Abode, between intimacy and extraneousness, between the opposite sensations of lightness and physical heaviness, between brightness and shadowiness. . In a progressive overcoming of material and imaginary thresholds, in his work, surface and depth effects, transparency and opacity are hybridized and contaminated, while the serial repetition of an industrial product never ceases to confront the uniqueness of a cast of 'artist.
Luca Clabot. Author with a vague mimetic-cataloging, taxonomic-definitional obsession, inclined to celebratory rituals, titling, symptomatically, his intervention in space 1914-2014 Does the body change, badly? it makes the chosen centenary run from the year that marks, with the beginning of the First World War, an epochal turning point for the West. In Luca Clabot collages, assemblages, photomontages of advertisements by fortune-tellers, magicians, hypnotists, illusionists, advice for slimming diets, taken from magazines, from large-scale newspapers, are finally formalized in the Esprit de géométrie of two of the works on the wall, readable as a cross puzzle, inevitably pharmaceutical, and a circle puzzle, referable to the waistline, from which springs, not without polite irony, the Latin anagram of the two terms Crucis and Circus. Game, paradox, suspicious verbal hybridizations, characterize the titles of these two series of works: 1914-2014 One hundred years of kilos celebrates and Farmagie on duty. The third series of works The rhymes will be the last, is divided into five panels of clippings from news headlines, not exempt from a touch of black humor, whose rhyme, a sort of slip that escaped the title list, sounds comic compared to an event tragic, like the firefighters force the door, but the old woman was already dead, with the result of an untimely Freudian wit. His video, with Bacharach's sound background, Legs so tan / Legs so tanned, which opens his exhibition itinerary, is an evident parodic allusion to the anxiolytic, hypnotic-relaxing properties of the well-known drug Lexotan. When asked about his specific artist, Luca Clabot recognizes himself as a last fringe of the Neo-New Dada season. In some way, this multimedia exploit significantly anticipates the 2016 celebrations for the centenary of Dada at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich (1916), coordinated by Commissioner Juri Steiner.