The Umberto Benappi Gallery, with the creative support of Riccardo Pietrantonio, continues its summer programme in the 'mountain gallery', with Np-ArtLab's exhibition Dialogue on Words. Serena Gamba - Alighiero Boetti. The Sansicario space was created to host projects realised with the collaboration of Italian and international galleries and to give the possibility of proposing culture in dislocated territories.
The third guest of the exhibition is the NP-ArtLab gallery (Padua - Milan), born from the idea of Neri Pagnan to create a space dedicated to the research and promotion of contemporary visual art practices, while maintaining a strong link and dialogue with the masters of the 20th century. In this sense, the gallery seeks to create, explore and interpret the aesthetic and conceptual dialogue that coexists between artists of different generations. The exhibition is dedicated precisely to the dialogue between the young artist Serena Gamba and the master Alighiero Boetti.
Among those presented are two works that artist Serena Gamba has created specifically in dialogue with Boetti's work. AeBeS is "a point of reflection on what I have to keep in mind, my solution to things. Letters joined by a ballpoint sign, stitched together, define themselves in space, positioned in an invisible, precise and apparently chaotic grid. An emptiness and a fullness, a stability and a disorder that put in writing not to lose me". (S. Gamba, 2024)
The second work reads with two inverted commas, the colour of a biro, which open and close in a grid, but the words are absent. Boetti's are the words, the ones that in his tapestries fill and solidly affirm his presence. "My quotation is my emptiness, an emptiness that silently hosts in my canvas the beauty of what is his, without the pretence of superimposing itself on what he has already perfectly enunciated. May my quest continue to gently bring to mind the greatness of one who has made art his life. Per due punti infinite rette, intentionally wrong from a theoretical point of view, stands for the infinite possibilities that can be generated by the "meeting" of two spirits". (S. Gamba, 2024)
Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994, Turin) made his debut in Turin as part of Arte Povera in January 1967. A conceptual, versatile and kaleidoscopic artist, he multiplied the types of works whose execution - in certain cases - was delegated with precise rules to other subjects and other hands, following the principle of "necessity and chance". Thus the biros (blues, blacks, reds, greens) in which the dotted background sets the stage for language; thus the embroideries of letters, small or large, and multicoloured; or the Tutto, dense puzzles in which heterogeneous silhouettes are found, including silhouettes of objects and animals, images taken from magazines and printed paper, and much more, really 'everything'.
Serena Gamba (1982, Moncalieri) works on the theme of memory and oblivion through word, sign and form. Her research is articulated around the meaning of painting and its declinations in relation to the visual arts. Images from the history of art are emptied of their meaning and then reworked to bring out their essential nature, far removed from flawed and pre-constituted forms.