Artist: Valerio Nicolai
Exhibition title: Permanent Transformation of a Magician in Ant
Curated by: Matteo Mottin
Venue: Treti Galaxie, Turin, Italy
Date: March 15 – 22, 2016
Photography: Sebastiano Pellion Di Persano, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Treti Galaxie, Turin
Sandro Mori, private banker in Torino, is pleased to invite you to the opening of “Permanent Transformation of a Magician in Ant”, solo show by Valerio Nicolai, curated by Matteo Mottin.
In his research Valerio Nicolai probes and interrogates the limits of pictorial composition, extending it beyond its own canonical borders through installations that constantly question their structure. For this exhibition the artist has used his unique sense of intuition and sensibility to paint a canvas that completely covers the floor space employing color fields, shapes and proportions which could be attractive to a bird.
In addition to a new series of paintings and a group of sculptures inspired by the shape of shelters for birds, each element of the canvas floor is designed as an integral part of the pictorial composition; the painting also encompasses the spectators, who are intended as movable elements perpendicular to the painted surface.
The real target audience of the show is a group of birds, free to fly around the exhibition space and coming to rest on the works and on the canvas. The artist combines the paradox of being able to paint for a bird with the inability of the group of birds to see themselves as protagonists of a piece of artwork. He then mirrors the whole concept onto the viewer, who also cannot have a total perception of the pictorial composition to which he belongs.
The work that gives the exhibition its title, and that ideally ends it and reverses its theoretical basis, consists of a light spot that highlights the place where a magician, we do not know whether due to an error or voluntarily, irreversibly transforms himself into an ant. An extensive knowledge, laboriously acquired during a lifetime of work and studies, is employed to take on an exposed form and obtain a point of view far away from the human perspective.
