Press release
MARCO BAGNOLI
VOLUCELLE
10.4 – 28.06.2024
opening 10.04.2024 | h. 17 – 20
Giorgio Persano Gallery is pleased to present VOLUCELLE, the exhibition that Marco Bagnoli has conceived for Persano’s Turin space in Via Stampatori. The artist returns to the gallery after the major EMA KHAM SUM exhibition in 2006 in via Principessa Clotilde.
The title of the exhibition, VOLUCELLE, is taken from a painting by Picabia and written in his own hand. The inscription contains the word luce – ‘light’ – which is the common thread in Bagnoli’s solo show and also gives the title to the alabaster chessboard with the shape of the chessmen referring both to the figure of the Harappa dancer – housed in the Delhi Archaeological Museum – and by allusion to Marcel Duchamp’s last game. In which the chessmen now occupy the entire space and no movement is possible.
The gallery space is thus dominated by this immobility that only light can pass through.
A large ‘bookcase’ occupies the central room, a ‘spacextime’ that becomes a container – and incorporates objects – as if to indicate how, underlying Bagnoli’s poetics, many options included in a unity can be accommodated.
The game of cross-references is favoured by the chessboard pawns that cast their shadows where Atelier Marco Bagnoli’s logo is painted: the words io x te and the Sanskrit word.
The wooden prototypes of the chessboard are also placed on the bookcase, emphasising that: “What counts, in his works, is dialogue, which makes the physical and the mental, the emotional and the logical resonate with each other through the use of colours and objects, lights and shadows,” as Germano Celant wrote in the monograph dedicated to the artist.
Also on display is a steel hot air balloon, Senza titolo (Fontana), 2002, containing a glass parabola copper enamelled in petit feu, and Nel Paesaggio di Xvarnah, a folder of graphics reproducing a pictorial intervention by the artist on seven Persian miniatures photographed in Istanbul and depicting a local landscape in a light without any shadow.
To complete the itinerary, there is log 0 = ̶ ∞ (Banda Rossa x parabola ∞), 19 February, 2014, a series of eight photographs in which iridescent reflections of the band are evidence of light in the concave of a copper parabola.
Band and Parabola, two of Bagnoli’s symbolic works, combine to create an unprecedented work.
The images are placed in dialogue with a stone pillar, Luce su pietra serena, 2010, that open and close the exhibition.
This unique work evokes a path of transmutation from stone to light.
Artworks of exhibitions
