Press release
SUSY GÓMEZ
Via Nuova
23.01 – 27.05.2023
opening 23.01.2023 | 4 – 9 pm
Giorgio Persano is pleased to present a new solo exhibition by Susy Gómez, a Spanish artist who has been working with the gallery for almost thirty years. The exhibition project revolves around unpublished large-format photographs and an important historical sculpture, Via Nuova (1995-1997), from which the exhibition takes its title.
In the centre of the room, two golden bodies stretch out towards each other, entities restoring form to the memory of a gesture. They are the result of a performative action, in which the artist covered her body with a porcelain paste, remaining for hours in a meditative state until the clay became as solid as a vase and opened like a shell. These ‘shells’ were then coated with a patina of gold which, in conceptual continuity with art of the past, acted as an intermediary between physical and incorporeal reality. And this is precisely the condition of the work, which embodies a memory that dissolves and becomes a vestige of the spirit.
Continuing her photographic research, Gómez selects subjects from magazines, appropriates them and intervenes pictorially, covering parts of the female bodies featured. The images thus processed are then photographed, greatly enlarged and finally reproduced on aluminium panels. The works themselves thus transcend their condition as photographs: their size, the metal support that gives them thickness and materiality, and the fact that they are placed on the ground, suggest to the spectator that they too can be interpreted as sculptures.
Through a visual synecdoche in which the isolated elements of the subjects are highlighted, Gómez picks on details that may be something we do not notice, or to which we do pay attention. In the artist’s works, the figures are thus concealed, hiding the whole to reveal just a part. On this part, the artist then constructs a reflection on individual identity and the representation of the feminine. Attempting to break the stereotypes imposed by a patriarchal and macho society, the figures are presented poised between matter and transcendence, becoming manifestations of the difficulty of achieving total understanding and dominion over one’s own body.
Artworks of exhibitions
