From Fabio Viale to Zorio and LaChapelle, at Poggiali's an exhibition on the concept of the rhizome

On view through Monday, Jan. 25, 2021 is Rhizome, a selection of works by the artists of the Poggiali Gallery in Florence that, in the wake of the concept of “rhizome” elaborated by French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, interconnect through a relationship of a horizontal nature devoid of the need for a center, in which each element is functional to the process, devoid of hierarchical determinations proper to a vertical tree system. It is an itinerary that winds through the space of Galleria Poggiali in Via della Scala 35 Ar, Florence, through the works of 13 authors.

In the first part of the spaces on Via della Scala, two marble works by Fabio Viale are installed, along with an Artificial Landscape by Goldschmied & Chiari, a work made by photographing colored smoke bombs in the studio and associating them with glass and mirror surface in a poetically and technically alchemical and performative process.Fabio Viale’s wall-mounted Kouros (Hollow), one of the Piedmontese artist’s early experiments with a suspended concave bust with classical appeal, conceived as a mighty force capable of emerging from the wall in the manner of a trophy, a shield, a disruptive epidermis, or an artifact, is fresh from its exhibition at the Puskin Museum in Moscow.

The thread of the medium of photography introduced by Artificial Landscape, continues through the exhibition of works by Slater Bradley and Grazia Toderi, protagonists of the Making Time exhibition in 2019, while shots by Luigi Ghirri, now in the major decennial exhibition at MAXXI in Rome Senzamargine, all published in the Gallery’s 2013 catalog and from the Emilian master’s most celebrated series, follow one another. The section concludes with a work from David LaChapelle’s Awakened series, shown at the bottom.

Rhizome’s roots broaden to touch on Gilberto Zorio’s Stella Africa, from 1983, a particularly iconic work in which the porcelain star lies on black leather; Claudio Parmiggiani, whose (after the 2019 exhibition in the Gallery’s A cuore aperto curated by Sergio Risaliti ) selected is a three-meter delocation whose subject is the famous bookcase, proposed at the MAXXI in Rome in an enveloping declination of 22 plates of more than two meters each to form an entire room without interruption, and a paper by Eliseo Mattiacci, which had been present not only in the Gallery but also in the monumental monograph Gong at Forte Belvedere in Florence in 2018.

Along with these wall works, belonging to arte povera, and outcomes of two artists known for languages that starting from poverist instances have traced autonomous poetics, finds place, still by Claudio Parmiggiani, the work Untitled, consisting of a mid-eighteenth-century harp with butterflies, presented in the first exhibition in a U.S. museum of the master from Reggio Emilia at the First Art Museum in Nashville in early 2019.

The artist, who poetically materialized absence and the passage of time by having soot deposited on board in particular, began by frequenting Morandi’s studio and referring to the work as a device capable of “striking like a punch in the stomach.” precedes the work of Enzo Cucchi, one of the protagonists of Transavaguardia, whose obsession with painting, with Van Gogh, with myths and with the overflowing of the perimeter of painting, are manifested in works that associate, now in the gallery, precisely the practice of painting with coal and ceramics.

The final part of the gallery is devoted to the return to painting that came to the fore in the late 1990s with Luca Pignatelli, Manfredi Beninati and Marco Fantini’s Prima di Prima, a large-scale work on panel presented for the first time in the solo exhibition at the Licini Museum in Ascoli Piceno and chosen for the cover of the catalog of the same project, for the first time in a private gallery. A work that synthesizes the iconographic complexity of the Vicenza artist and brings together his salient facets.

Pignatelli’s classic subjects such as Aphrodite and Female Head are presented on the support of the railway tarpaulin that has always distinguished his poetics, both in the original brown version and in the updated experiments with the introduction of color, reclaimed wood, or paper.

Manfredi Beninati’s work, already present at the Venice, Liverpool, Istanbul, and Thessaloniki Biennales since 2009, is a recent work, a synthesis of the Sicilian artist’s intimate dimension on which it draws to, through the cultured rereading of literature not only Italian, return a personal exploration of the theme of life’s journey.

For all information you can send an email to info@galleriapoggiali.com, or visit the official website of Poggiali Gallery.

Image: Gilberto Zorio, Stella-Africa (1983; terracotta on leather, 160x296 cm)

From Fabio Viale to Zorio and LaChapelle, at Poggiali's an exhibition on the concept of the rhizome

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.