In San Marino the first solo exhibition of the young Zeno Bertozzi

From Oct. 2 to Nov. 30, 2021, Claudio Poleschi Arte Contemporanea Gallery, on the sidelines of Bertozzi & Casoni ’s ongoing Evergreen exhibition at the gallery’s Dogana(San Marino) location, in a collateral room dedicated to new projects, will show the public a preview of the young artist Zeno Bertozzi ’s unpublished works with his solo exhibition Con tatto: Zeno Bertozzi, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, has already participated in various group exhibitions and this is his first solo show.

His initial works had as a term of comparison and experimentation works of antiquity such as busts by Andrea della Robbia or the Venus of Milo, a work, the latter, in the exhibition. Working on plaster casts, Zeno Bertozzi selectively proceeded in a sort of plastic tattooing of the tender material, obtaining effects that lie between bone calcification, a natural effect and concretions of the most diverse nature. The result is a reflection on a time that can alter and vary surfaces eternal in their classic beauty and on the relationship between a perfect and admirable epithelium (the work of human thought and hand) and an interior of quite different origin and appearance. Under the sign of metamorphosis, this kind of intervention, meticulously executed with the fine point of a burin, was then repeated on the other works in the exhibition: circular or rectangular plates (almost Suprematist or minimalist in their tautological presence) triggering even for modern art a path back to the original conformation of materials and, after all, to nature.

“In my work,” says Zeno Bertozzi, “I have tried to represent my obsession, which is aimed toward the manual repetition of the sign. A constant repetition, which always includes the idea of time, through a repetitive contemplation that shapes matter through iron needles, creating craters and shapes that are transformed into the unit of measure of the invisible passage of time. An obsession that is extinguished when I pierce the plate with a hole.”

“I pay a lot of attention,” the artist adds, “to the various possibilities that the material I use can give, from ceramics in early works, to plaster, a fairly soft material that lends itself to being worked with simple methods. When the surface is at the right hardness I begin a kind of plastic tattooing, a repetition of manual pressure performed with an iron needle on the tender material, a calm and obsessive elaboration that slowly transforms the work. A cautious repetition of utmost concentration to obviate errors with scrupulous attention, this ever-seeking insistence is able to generate a contemplation with which it is possible to immerse ourselves in a dimension of my own, through calm and patience helping our gaze to grasp and hold an intimacy that often escapes. A doing and a movement that chases time, not to reach it but to come to conceive its mechanics and unrepeatability.”

Born in Castel San Pietro Terme in 1994, Zeno Bertozzi has been attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna since 2015, where he began to elaborate and experiment in the field of sculpture, thus approaching his first sculptures, while at the same time working at the Bertozzi & Casoni studio. Parallel to his studies, he has taken part in various group exhibitions including: Garten, Correggio, 2016; Radice Quadrata, Imola, 2017; Nouvelle Vague 9, “New subjects of visual research,” Russi, 2018; Index, Opentour 2018, Labs Gallery Arte Contemporanea, Bologna, 2018; To be going to, Opentour, P420 Arte Contemporanea, Bologna, 2019; Tassellation, Ex - Forno Mambo, Bologna, 2019.

In his research, Zeno Bertozzi always tries to include the dimension of time that transforms the work slowly through his hand, an obsession that he extinguishes when he pierces the work with a hole, trapping an instant in that moment. Time without an action or an instant that carries with it an event is, according to the artist, pure abstraction. “Through my work,” the artist concludes, “I have tried to trace that instant, which is realized in the small mutations that take place in apparent stillness.”

For more information you can visit the Claudio Poleschi Gallery website. Below are some of Zeno Bertozzi’s works.

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In San Marino the first solo exhibition of the young Zeno Bertozzi

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