Namsal Siedlecki and Andrea Zucchini at Acappella

Artists: Namsal Siedlecki and Andrea Zucchini

Exhibition title: SOMA

Venue: Acappella, Naples, Italy

Date: January 25 – March 20, 2019

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Acappella, Naples

Soma is an exhibition conceived as a celestial body that implodes and explodes in time and matter.

Fall

Make yourself heavy. Forget the anthropocentric posture, fall.

In the not so distant past, people discussed the existence of different kingdoms: animal, vegetable and mineral. This division had been accomplished by man to organize those animated bodies that differed from his own. And again, it is man who is responsible for the creation of the arrow of time and the mediation with inanimate objects. As a matter of fact, archeology of humans did not once exist, only that of objects. But let’s slowly return to the present, to the archeology of man, which investigates and studies the traces imprinted by human bodies.

It is the lack of bodies that conducts research in dust, in dreams, in abstract surfaces and faded ashes.

Finding, again

In a frame in which we can visually weigh fragments of matter and body, a space-sheltered from traces welcomes us with a vision. A ritual is fulfilled. An inversion of perspectives takes place.

The psychological interior is dug into dreams, into the immaterial temperatures of post-industrial, gray cities. The mask of the environmental catastrophe is a psychological countertransference. It is one of the temporal layers closest to us in the chronological scale of human archeology.

Described as eyes and as dust. The eyes contracted by a human body, alive and clear, lie on the body of a birch tree. Such is the Untitled sculpture by Andrea Zucchini[1].

Another trace of human discovery is welcomed by the space: a hybrid object. Squash[2] (Namsal Siedlecki, 2018) is the body of a pumpkin galvanized with layers of silver. A slight step towards divisions being overcome in kingdoms, and a collaboration between time and natural species. The artificial shell, so evident on the surface, swallows the inorganic nature of the pumpkin, making the two temporalities immortal. With an obvious difference, a metamorphosis. State of passage. Hybridization of matter, time. Gravitational laws have been restricted to centrifugal washing of human archeology.

Matter performs a remote revenge.

Ghosts

Abstract track and spasm of the material is the white skin, a living skin, hung on the walls, a sort of exposed shroud. It is a canvas that is nothing but parchment, a membrane obtained from the skin of an animal (lamb or calf), not tanned, an abstract and tangible surface: Vellum[3]. A dance of ashes, the last breath of matter, implodes according to gravitational and psychotic laws. The floor is strewn with fine dust, bone dust, origin and end: Open Container[4].

Initiation

The bodies we find here are casts, images impressed in space, the future of a new reconciliation between time and matter.

-Sonia D’Alto

1) Andrea Zucchini, Untitled, 2017, expanding polyurethane foam, polyester resin, pigment.
2) Namsal Siedlecki, Squash, 2018, nickel, pumpkin, 30 x 10 x 10 cm.
3) Namsal Siedlecki, Vellum, 2018, parchment, 79 x 90 cm.
4) Andrea Zucchini, Open Container, 2017, animal bone ash