Modica, art by Samantha Torrisi and Ivan Terranova shows human effects on the environment

Art as an invitation to reflect on the need to improve the relationship between man and the environment. This is the idea at the heart of Samantha Torrisi and Ivan Terranova’s exhibition After the Human Colonialism, curated by Valeria D’Amico and Giuseppe Lo Magno, hosted at Lo Magno Gallery in Modica until Feb. 29, 2024.

In an anthropocentric society, the project After the Human Colonialism aims to invite the visitor to take an introspective journey through the works of Samantha Torrisi (Catania, 1977), which represent wooded territories of her land, made in oil on canvas and board and presented together with the video installation by Ivan Terranova (Catania, 1990) with images taken from photo-traps, placed by the artist in woods of the Sicilian Apennines. The researches of Samantha Torrisi and Ivan Terrannova meet and dialogue, offering different tools and gazes that aim at the same direction: places (aspects) and nonplaces, a quote from Marc Augé. Both agree on the urgency of ending the havoc wreaked on nature with solutions based on scientific knowledge and understanding of the ecological dynamics of forests and natural environments. Nowadays, on the other hand, ecological and sustainability theories, turn out to be marginal adjustments in a subject that, if not managed from an altÄ•ro point of view, always ends up falling back into the same starting logic, obtaining partial and incomplete results.

The invitation that passes through these artistic productions is to question our social system with reference to the words of philosopher Roberto Mancini: “Sustainability, innovation, inclusion are words that lie because they are like patches that the current system offers us to say that contradictions will be fixed. What is needed is the generation of another way of being in the world, a new birth.”

The term mirror finds an essential place in the artistic transposition of Samantha Torrisi’s work, as Mario Gerosa summarizes, “The world represented in the paintings, living as if behind the mirror, in a dimension of its own, where all physical laws are subverted.”

In the painter’s works, the theme of the forest returns as an archetype that becomes a tool for addressing the contemplative transcendence to which we naturally tend. Often in the artist’s representations of the forest, sign-symbols recur that remind us with poetic and feminine characters of the narrowness of the anthropization of the enchanted places she describes. The works transcend their perimeters becoming infinite spaces of history observable from behind a mirror, from where we are only allowed to pause for contemplation. And it is precisely the ability to contemplate nature that we need to find again, after having lost it in pursuit of frenetic and discordant rhythms. The landscapes transfigure their boundaries in a movement that at times evokes the techniques used by Gerhard Richter and at others seems to draw from a shot by Michelangelo Antonioni in the film Blow-Up. The artist, linked at the origins of her path to film grammar, still does not hide its reverberation: the indefiniteness of the video effect evoked by the evanescence of the settings, by the aesthetic filter it creates between the image (real or unreal) of reference and the viewer. A path of which today we appreciate the full possession of an incisive dynamism and symbolic mastery.

Through the installation Fabula, Ivan Terranova leads on a journey to a primordial encounter between the contemporary human being and nature. His artistic intuition originates from a video-photographic research on the presence or absence of the Sicilian wolf species, between the animal world that instinctively adheres to life and the rational world of man who chooses to modulate it according to his needs. The wolf because it is still considered the symbol of a wild soul, of a winning status, of unconditional strength. The disappearance of the Sicilian wolf (Canis Lupus Cristaldii), the last specimen of which was culled about 100 years ago, according to the artist has affected eco-systemic balances and also represents the loss of a historical/cultural heritage. After choosing some areas of the Sicilian Apennines, he placed some photo-traps there that returned images of an ancestral nocturnal dimension, not yet entirely tamed, of places utopically shared by the whole community of living things, humans and animals."

After the Human Colonialism also involves the 4L graphic design students of Brescia’s Liceo “Leonardo” who curated the graphic design, disrupting usual aesthetic principles. The intent of the exhibition is to give space to the concept of love for nature, a universal motto in a historical moment when it becomes necessary to take care of the way we are in the world. In particular, 2023 marked the entire country with violent cloudbursts, floods and fires. Phenomena monitored by Legambiente, which also collaborates in the project with the elaboration of some texts edited by the Ragusa section of the environmentalist association, which put the emphasis on the actions put in place, with insights on the regional context and the awareness campaign against fires “Sicily put on fire” and with concrete proposals addressed to regional institutions, to request some urgent measures to counter some behaviors that are at the basis of many fires in rural areas.

The exhibition also has the support of Feudo Ramaddini wineries. For all information, you can call +39 0932 76 31 65 or send an email to info@lomagnoartecontemporanea.it.

Biographical notes on the artists

Samantha Torrisi (Catania, 1977). Her works evoke a technological sphere that appropriates painting, making it acquire a “phenomenological” and almost dreamlike dimension, with constant reference to current urgencies. In more than twenty years of activity, he has exhibited in galleries, museums and foundations both in Italy and abroad(Spain, Portugal, Lithuania, Turkey, Greece, France) and has collaborated in several international projects including Etna Eternal Flame on the volcano, in collaboration with Monira Foundation in New York and Fondazione Orestiadi di Gibellina in which in 2023 he is also present within the framework of the Artist Residencies program. He recently exhibited at theItalian Cultural Institute in Paris for the exhibition À fleur de peau. In 2023 he is also a finalist in Arteam Cup at the Priamar Fortress in Savona and EneganArt at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and is among the artists in the group show Messaggi. Antonello contemporaries at the Regional Gallery of Palazzo Bellomo in Syracuse. His works can be found in several public and private collections. He lives and works on the slopes of MountEtna.

Ivan Terranova (Catania, 1990). Since the age of 4 he has dedicated himself to the study of the piano, from classical music to the most modern languages, up to the study of jazz music and the activity of concert performer. At the same time, given his interest in the visual arts and photography over the years, he enrolled in theAcademy of Fine Arts, where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in “Technological Arts,” discussing a thesis on synaesthetic links between musicians and artists in contemporary arts. He graduated in the two-year Photography program at the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania with an experimental thesis on the relationship between photography and ephemeral art. He currently collaborates as an artist, curator and lecturer with public and private institutions. Ivan Terranova’s research stems from the study and reflections on the contemporary landscape, geographies and the ecological and cultural relations of the Anthropocene. By making photography interact with other languages, the landscape becomes the perimeter of action in which to analyze elements to be taken and reinterpreted or the scenario of temporary environmental installations, in which the photographic tool becomes the memory of solitary experiences. In the works we find territories suspended between reality and representation, nature and artifice, human and animal, ritual and devotion, document and poetry that induce us to rethink with alternative points of view the relationship between man and the environment.

Modica, art by Samantha Torrisi and Ivan Terranova shows human effects on the environment

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