Melissa Provezza / Elisa Saggiomo – Sol Invictus

Opening Saturday 12 October 2013 from 18,30 all 20,30

Saturday 12 October 2013 from 18,30 all 20,30 TESTONI SPACE Gallery in Via D'Azeglio 50 , Bologna opens the double solo Melissa Provezza and Elisa Saggiomo "SOL INVICTUS” a cura di Francesco Gattuso e Alberto Mattia Martini.

Two young artists, Elisa Saggiomo, which represents the big cities, then the places where you consume mainly the hardships and tragedies of everyday existence, metaphorically represented by video with battles between birds and fish projected directly on his paintings, accompanied by soundtracks specially created by Carmine Onorati, and Melissa Provezza, representing the constraints and censorship on humans weaker, such as women and children, or human figures which are made up in several layers of painted canvas and overlaid with openings shaped single-celled one another, to remind us of the complexity of the different personality, result of the stratification of the life experiences intensely lived.
For both the use of the color white as the basic chromaticity, extreme synthesis of all colors, the most alive and those darker and more dramatic, they are made of the stories of the city and the people who live there. But the white, not the color made from all colors of the rainbow, generates daily hope, a 'SOL INVICTUS”, strength and winning of eternal rebirth of good over evil.

MELISSA Provezza

You can "look" beyond the ethereal color? The bodies and the figures represented by Melissa Provezza identity are vulnerable, often children, adolescents and female figures, invested by a double sections with visibility diaphanous, govern a double play that does not pass through only a voyeurism easily identified with nudity. Take the force of the emergency, figures which have not alienating effect, emerge to meet the observer, generate communicative power that leads to consideration. In this exhibition you add the element of "layering" of some works that frees, surprises and keeps the creative act of the author. – Francesco Gattuso

Formally, the image is on the edge of existence, visibility and flaunts identity faded, without color. They are bodies without body, transparent, traversable, deprived of meat for carnivorous eyes, are thrown to the viewer-voyeur. Silhouettes ethereal oil paintings in black and white, su fondi bianchissimi abbacinanti, represent naked bodies, often among the most vulnerable, on which are sometimes superimposed elements that oggettualizzano even more the subject (chewing gum, metal eyelets, etc..).
Subtract the body to speak of the body and not only, but rather what is left, the remains of its use, the consequences of the gaze voracious. In the painting the subject occupies an intimate space in solitude. A painting in fading that is implicitly metapittorica reflection on the survival of painting itself - Figurative - today.
The most recent works are composed of several layers of painted canvas, overlapping each other. The image painted on canvas before continuing on the second, whose visibility is limited by a cut that penetrates the first layer. The same goes for the subsequent layers. The full vision of the underlying image is allowed to the user the ability to lift the canvas that is before. The shape of the holes is reminiscent of human cells healthy and sick (in a link between micro and macro, between inside and outside, between physical and metaphysical).
The figure represented, decomposed in its entirety, layered and punctured, you have a partial view: evocative of how the human being, even in its nakedness is complex and metaphorical - as well as skin - has more layers behind which reveals. Similarly, not everything that is painted is immediately visible: This is a painting that goes first imagined and then discover, as it happens with people. – Melissa Provezza

Biographical Notes

Melissa was born in Provezza Orzinuovi (Brescia), lives and works in Milan. Both in Italy and abroad has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions, at private galleries and institutional spaces, as well as participating in art fairs and competitions in which you have selected and / or rewarded. He has exhibited at the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Hall Academy, alle Tese Arsenale di San Cristoforo (catalog published by Skira).

ELISA Saggiomo

We had left a few years ago Elisa Saggiomo, exactly three years ago, in the middle of a journey symbolic / imaginary between the plots of electrical wires: unlimited intersections, traveling in nature without respite, finding that much while dining on some lattice. Making an easy, but extremely truthful similarity, you could compare the intersections of the wires with the intricacies and labyrinths that life "gives". A journey without stopping and perhaps aimlessly.
Today we find Elisa Saggiomo the road again; the route is now no longer suspended between the balance of the wires or the geometry of the bridges, but it is a daily walk where steps, eyes thoughts are immersed and lost in the city.
Are the spaces of the urban, more precisely the city in its size air, panoramic images from which emerge the houses seen with the eye of one who turns away from the bustle and observes its own nest, trying to look and look from an unusual perspective. The points on which the Saggiomo focuses are those that have been and still are an inseparable part of its existence, its history: Florence, Bologna and Naples.
Elisa look closely, scrutinizes, investigates, but above everything, with the sensitivity and sweetness that dwell within his soul, listen and then is able to pick up the vibrations inherent in the places of the human.

Once the subject, replaces the mechanical eye with which the Saggiomo photographically capture an image and then go and apply on board and then intervene with oil colors. The protagonist is white, with his candid and gentle presence that, Elisa with slight layering glazes, giving the work a melancholy light and extremely symptomatic presence of absence: the human. As stated by the same artist: "I try to grasp the meaning of the human community. This feeling of community I seem to find it in panoramic urban, where the city back perhaps to be almost an idea of ​​the city, where the human presence seems to be a thing, a short passage. Meeting the sense of man in his absence. "
Places that transmute their lives in an apparent destiny aseptic, who does not see human presence, but I hear the breathing and thoughts; what we might call an "apparent death" that finds its resurgence in white color, a sol invictus luminescence which is made materially through the video projection directly on the image of the city. Here is a sort of metamorphosis, in which flocks of birds appear to have taken the clothes of men: fly over city, separately, then join, sometimes confusingly, unstably, and then break up and still be reunited almost totally obscuring the sky. A metaphor of contemporary, smarritosi within his own reality, tremendously unstable and vague, not only in search of himself, but who fights every day with and against his peers to find an identity that today is only insecurity. A sudden light strikes our eyes, dazzles us, wakes us up from the cold and numbness, just as the unconquered sun is reborn after hibernation on the day of the winter solstice: then all is not lost, always reappears after the night light. Maybe we were just dreaming… – Alberto Mattia Martini

Biographical Notes

Born in Florence in 1982, for several years he lived and worked in Bologna and now is back in his hometown. She graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara and Naples, very often uses the photographic base for the realization of his works. Winner of the First Prize of Contemporary Art in Val di Sambro 2009 assigned by the jury chaired by Professor Vera Fortunati, in 2010 at the Gallery Space Testoni of Bologna presented "HIGH / VOLTAGE" his solo exhibition, curated by Alberto Mattia Martini. Prize finalist "First Light 2013," has participated at the collective talents of photography at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa.

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