L’isola portatile at ADA

Artists: Benni Bosetto, Guendalina Cerruti, Lisa Dalfino e Sacha Kanah, Diego Gualandris, Viola Leddi, Riccardo Sala, Namsal Siedlecki, Alice Visentin

Exhibition title: L’isola portatile

Curated by: Caterina Molteni

Venue: ADA, Rome, Italy

Date: June 1 – July 28, 2018

Photography: Roberto Apa / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and ADA, Rome

The exhibition was named after Alberto Savinio’s painting L’isola portatile (Portable Island),1930, depicting a mysterious landscape surrounded by an environment in between reality and fantasy.

The work circumscribes an imaginary space: a platform that does not correspond to a completely new image of the world, but is made of natural and exotic elements, daily objects of the bourgeois culture and literary mythological references.

The artist puts into practice a state of thought substituting the vision to the idea and the logical, the dimension that spontaneously introduces to a tale or a story.

Figment of imagination, the tale is an instrument to rejoin sensibility and intellect, an exercise in thought that constantly appeared and disappeared in the history of culture in the shape of myths, fables and legends, to return as daily rituals and mystic cults.

All these practices, besides showing man’s creative capacity, are now gestures of resistance towards a precise way of communicating, codifying, and reporting the facts.

More and more artists end up rebuilding and redefining an imaginary space as a diverse device to observe any mysterious, sentimental, mystical, and magical thing that reality can contain. Artists share a gaze that is not naive, but strongly cynical and disenchanted with regards to the contemporary world. Aware of a precise state of things, they investigate a certain vital force being transmitted into figurative painting with

references to Greek and Etruscan mythology, as much as to fantasy and pagan cosmology. In the sculptural practice, said vital force explores, marveling at it, the hidden nature of materials and creates new combinations of physical and cultural features.

The exhibited artworks wish to serve as either the prologue or a fragment of a tale – though avoiding any story with a development – because the idea of belonging to a fake or real shared story is not as fascinating as that of practicing the state of mind that human beings adopt when they open a book and start to listen.

-Caterina Molteni