‘Venezia Madre’, Paolo Asti returns to the Serenissima to promote five international artists
A female exhibition that finds in the Mother Venice the nickname with which to represent the fruitful relationship of exchanges that the lagoon city has been able to weave between West and East for centuries. Paolo Asti in the next exhibition in the Queen city of the Adriatic, “Republic in its new city”, The state of the art in the next and suggestive location of Ca ‘Cappello Memo. If the last time, it was 2019, he chose to bring the La Spezia of Bellani, Vaccarone and Tomaino to Venice as part of the “China Italy Experience Space”, this time the protagonists are young artists of international standing. “With the realization of the LIX International Art Exhibition in Venice, scheduled for 2021 and postponed to 2022 due to the pandemic, I had the feeling that art had returned to a state of freedom – he explains -. What has happened in the last two months and still happens before our eyes, demonstrating that the state in which we live and consequently art also lives, is perhaps that of a probation. The daily news places men in a position to take sides for or against someone. Above all, against war, in favor of peace, but also against or in favor of the forces in the field, which events, mediated by television and the press, unite on two fronts one against the other ”.
In short, the idea comes from here.
“Yes, from this consideration. We will be present in Venice, in an irreverent way, like a real Republic, that of Startè, making a mockery of the official pavilions of this new edition. I then thought of putting an aggravating circumstance of thought, that of aiming not only to achieve an ephemeral state, but also that of a state in which art is free. Free from any kind of connivance with market strategies, dysfunctional to any ideological rhetoric, out of the myths, but not without a common thread “.
Because Venice is many things.
“Not only the tradition of its businesses, but also the ability to attract, thanks to a unique identity in the world, renewed, from one century to another, to the point of being taken as a sought-after destination starting from the Grand Tour and so on to this new century.
To guide us the thread of this relationship, the choice is based on four artists, Silvia Scaringella, Beatrice Speranza, Beatrice Taponecco, who are able to represent, with their work, the concept of Mater: of thought, of nature, of contaminations, of relationships between places and people. An area that leaves great space for the expressiveness of the individual artists, in which the concept of Mother is revealed by articulating the matrix in: SilkMadre – SciameMadre – LuceMadre – FogliaMadre. The choice is to exhibit at Ca ‘Cappello Memo, which brings us back with the thread of history to what Venice was, through the events of a patrician family, the Cappello family, who came to the lagoon city to escape the Saracen incursions. To the Cappello is attributed the construction of the church of Santa Maria Mater Domini, originally built as a monastery. A whole that therefore returns according to that randomness that appears mysterious but which, in Venice, can happen by passing from one street to another.
One of the protagonists is Aidan Salakhova, an independent Azerbaijani-Russian artist.
In a climate in which, in some ways, the context of cultural production has revealed itself, due to the conflict in a witch hunt, I thought that the Republic of Startè could give asylum to Aidan, already present at the 1991 and 2011 Biennials. A tribute to his art where – a single work – an open book with a staircase that descends into its depth and rises from it, has the power to force us to reflect in which maternal knowledge is the cradle for men and at the same time hope. future.
PROTAGONIST
Arianna Ellero
Silvia Scaringella
The canvases look like embroideries suspended in time, concrete constructions of an immaterial reality. The artist materializes time, he wants to deepen the link between the real and the virtual by building a language in which the ancient and the future are welded together in a time capsule. They are designs that recall different elements from baroque decoration to modernist architecture, symbols of a new aesthetic language. The “writing” spread with Japanese ink recalls visual sounds, when it intervenes with Braille a tactile element is also added. The sweet drapery accompanies these light works like a whisper. In the “Ecosystem” sculpture, the finely worked bees in marble with bronze legs recall a possible present of collaboration in which culture becomes a collective force. It is no coincidence that the idea of flight as a synthesis of a recovery together with the construction of life comes to “Aneurisma”, a large graphic installation that pervades the space. A strongly symbolic work on the inability to have a synthesis of making common, an invitation to collaboration and coexistence.
Beatrice Speranza
The artist makes an extremely important use of photography, recovering its essence above all in the relationship with memory and the presence of reality. “Flight exercises” – Print on cotton paper and wool thread embroidery, wooden base with steel profiles. The images of marine horizons communicate with light, contain it but are also increased in its shape. The “Light” project in photography, embroidery and gold leaf opens up new poetic possibilities by recalling a dematerialization that both gold and the image evoke. The concept of descriptive representation does not linger on values there, it suggests open positions, photography recalls a link with phenomenal reality, but this is connected with a non-visible in a complex and poetic relationship at the same time. Beatrice Speranza mixes in her works the need to detach herself from the concreteness of bonds. With “Esercizi di volo” the photographic void of the wide spaces between earth and sky is made even lighter by the wooden structure that supports the images, printed on cotton paper. Embroidery is a sign of belonging, a form of writing. Moreover, the series bears textual fragments on the back of the book “The poet of the air” by Chicca Gagliardo.
Beatrice Taponecco
The report on the work dedicated to leaves opens up to a shared value of nature. The principle remains the collaboration between coexisting principles that seem to belong to different orders of magnitude, but hide being identical. Art is a part of nature and vice versa, art can stop and pass on positive memories of an inspiration that must not be forgotten. The artist finely embroiders the proof of the material looking for its ultimate nature. One after the other the leaves reveal the whiteness of an ethereal matter. It’s a form which is returned. Creation recreates the existing. Even in the variation of the materials Beatrice retains the sense of an authentic revelation. Art, we repeat, is not in competition with nature because it becomes a component of it, it acts on the memory linked to archetypes, to something we cannot do without, even if the speed allowed to exist today does not take part in it. The time of sculpture takes back life, it becomes genesis in these precious and poetic works like the amazement of simplicity.
Aidan Salachova
An international artist with galleries from London to Berlin, Aidan Salakhova, an Azerbaijani-Russian artist with a studio also in Carrara, works mainly with the language of sculpture. Her works bring together profound and archetypal, with references to her own culture of origin translated into an international perspective. Supported by an extraordinary technique, she manages to create works that discover new expressive possibilities in figuration. But her aesthetic synthesis goes in the direction of an art without borders or linguistic or cultural barriers. In the 2020 “Without words (Books series)” series, books made of precious marbles are visual and tactile evidence of total adherence to culture as a social and mutual good, as the foundation of tolerance. The works, real small monuments to the value of the book as a factor of shared knowledge, are evidence of how sculpture can “speak” to everyone through an innovative and contemporary as well as universal language.