In Sarzana, the solo exhibition Oltre by Mirko Baricchi at Cardelli & Fontana

The Cardelli & Fontana gallery in Sarzana is hosting, from November 27, 2021 to January 15, 2022, the solo show Oltre (Beyond ) by Mirko Baricchi, who thus returns to exhibit at the Ligurian gallery, and brings his new works to the public, with a review for which a title rich in implications was chosen. “Beyond” suggests in fact a passage, an advancement, which plays with the title of the previous solo show at Cardelli & Fontana, Selva of 2018, where the first “selve” of the La Spezia artist’s production were exhibited.

"Beyond," writes critic Giuseppe Frangi in the text accompanying the exhibition, "is a title that also tells of a constant in Baricchi’s painting. Specifically, it tells of his determination to settle on the one-dimensionality of the surface of the canvas, as the surface has an absorbing energy and encompasses, indeed embraces, his ’beyond’ as well. The surface is like a fabric that in its weaves holds a whole. The series of recent works that we might rename ’open-air’ also suggest another hypothesis for reading Baricchi’s painting. In these canvases an upward movement is grasped, which from the clumps of color juxtaposed at the base pushes in the direction of chromatically brighter and rarer areas. Exchanges of chromatic reflections then occur between the two areas of the canvas, giving a very lyrical unity to the composition. Baricchi’s painting proposes this continuous ambiguity between vertical and horizontal, and not only in these recent canvases. Indeed, we can ask ourselves: with the works of the Selva cycle are we dealing with a recreation on canvas of the forest surface as if it were a freehand frottage, or is Baricchi working in section and what we see is actually a stratigraphy, a work of a geological nature? Is Baricchi more on the side of Monet’s expansive painting or Cézanne’s tectonic painting? Are his mosses, dry leaves, moist earth surfaces, or are they instead strata, overthrust faults of the earth’s crust?"

“Baricchi,” Frangi concludes, “always lets these slippages happen in his paintings. They are slippages consequent to a precise starting condition: his painting does not contemplate that the landscape, on which he exclusively feeds, is an entity to be represented. Landscape is thus something that must happen on the canvas, something consubstantial to the painting itself: in this approach one senses the mark of Courbet’s great lesson, which is grafted onto the enamored persistence of a Venetian imprinting. For painting to take place Baricchi must necessarily undergo a kind of executive asceticism. It is no accident that he speaks of ’an obsession with an objective mode.’ That is why in so many cases we see his painting act by subtraction; it is scratched, or it dematerializes into liquid conglomerates. This is why Baricchi always squeezes the space into close-ups that exclude vanishing points, ascetically forcing himself to a tenacious concentration on single patches of land (or even air): the landscape for him is not a view, it is the visual matter that reveals itself before his eyes every morning when he lifts the shutter of his studio. It is at that point that the alchemy is activated: the canvas functions as an incubator and new landscape takes root on its surface each time.”

The exhibition opens Tuesday through Saturday from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., Mondays from 4:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., closed Sundays. Free admission. For information: www.cardelliefontana.com, galleria@cardelliefontana.com, phone 0187.626374 or 339.607927272. Facebook: cardelliefontana. Instagram: @cardelliefontana

View of the

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Mirko Baricchi, Selva

Mirko Baricchi,

Mirko Baricchi,

In Sarzana, the solo exhibition Oltre by Mirko Baricchi at Cardelli & Fontana

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