Francesco De Prezzo at Palazzo Monti

Artist: Francesco De Prezzo

Exhibition title: REPRESENT

Curated by: Marialuisa Pastò

Venue: Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy

Date: October 6 – 20, 2018

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Palazzo Monti, Brescia

The light of the night is a revealing glare that vanishes when silence comes and words become ineffective – while the eye forces its look somewhere else, losing itself in distances that it cannot reach.

Work tools register their rest on the room walls and thoughts trip into the weave of their thin shadows.

The night suppresses the idle details of day, as does memory, and that moment is the space for the privilege of an ordinary thought – recollections of a recently concluded present get lost in the echo of images whispered by the distracted city, almost as if they were the beginning of an unfinished sentence.

They say reality is no more than hidden fiction. The desire to preserve the memories of each experience is a quest for the connection with whatever surrounds us – that gift book we received but never read, a helmet laid on a shelf, the jacket we only wore once, the bike wheel we haven’t repaired yet, the sealed packages of cleaning products forgotten on a wooden shelf in the corner of the studio…

The fear of loss resembles a passive apnoea that mixes up living the present and projecting a future resolution.

But the frenzy delays the action, the anxiety of the finish line eclipses the conquer of waiting.

In the shadow spaces of the room, the objects lose their outlines and impress their stylized traces on the surface, as if they were the reverse side of a fine embroidery.

And while the night is patiently waiting to become day once again, it leaves its place to a gap that turns into a new question.

In that hesitation, everything dissolves and the world lets itself be seen.

There’s relief in the white space of waiting.

On its second edition, Palazzo Monti Residency Program is happy to host “Represent”, the end of residency exhibition by Francesco De Prezzo.

In its most literal sense, the term representation acquires the meaning of re-presentation – that is making something present again.

The title of the show “Represent” refers both to the act of representing and to the content of the representative action itself, the image that becomes object in order to be communicated to someone else.

The works by Francesco De Prezzo (*1994) are the result of an action that copies from reality elements borrowed by the surrounding environment and portions of its studio.

His subjects pass onto the canvas, giving life to faithful reproductions that wonder about the spatial relation between each other and the one between the observer and the observed object.

After this first phase comes a covering action, through which the images resolve their authenticity in a process of self-negation. Thick layers of white polish or solvent applied on the finished forms wipe out most of their comprehension, keeping the integrity of just a few fragments.

The big uniform layers of rolled color that overwrite the preexisting image – as does the melted polish – transform the canvas into an open space, full of possibilities where nothing seems to undermine the circumstances of change.

De Prezzo rethink the relation between space and dimension and raises questions on the dynamics of the fruition of art, giving them a new interpretation.

His gesture is quiet and silent, transforming the eloquence of the reproduced object into a link between concealment and manifestation. It runs from painting emphasis and quests for a natural conclusion in the absence of noise, which – in fact – hides by unveiling. And by doing this, it finally invites the observer into a silent complicity.

– Marialuisa Pastò