Rome, at z2o Sara Zanin gallery the solo exhibition of Michele Tocca

In Rome, z2o Sara Zanin Gallery hosts from May 9 to July 31 the exhibition Poca notte, the first solo gallery show of Michele Tocca (Subiaco, 1983), curated by Davide Ferri. Poca notte includes a group of previously unpublished paintings that show recent developments in the artist’s poetics, based on an approach to painting that takes place in the presence of things, portrayed live and sometimes on a 1:1 scale, in a here-and-now of the image that does not involve retouching after the fact but only the practice of direct observation and action, a processuality that evokes the figures of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painters/travelers and connoisseurs who, on the road for several months, beat the territory of the countryside and cities.

The subjects of the paintings included in the exhibition are some of the recurring ones in Tocca’s painting: things and objects (the crumpled and crumpled newspaper from the day before, brooms and household implements lying in a corner of the house,-forgotten, on the sidelines of everything, before use- worn shoes and jackets, still damp with rain, impregnated with atmospheric humors, of the outside, “jackets-landscape”); and again, landscapes, seen through a window, i.e. through the vapors that are deposited on the glass - interior vapors that mingle with exterior ones (clouds and atmospheric clots) to establish a continuity of vision between inside and outside - visions framed or partially covered by the underside of an umbrella, or the sashes of a window.

Touch also paints small/medium format paintings and isolates them on the gallery walls to resonate different points of view of the exhibition space and temporary dialogues at a distance; paintings with markedly horizontal or vertical cuts, whose surface is almost entirely occupied by the surface of the painted objects, as if there were a coincidence between a “cosality” of the painting and the thing represented.

What unites these new works, however, is that they arise from a particular condition of vision, one that coincides with an intermediate time between night and day, when the first flashes and ignitions of light open the vision, at first dimly, and then resonate in the darkness. “It is the ideal dimension of almost nothing,” says the artist, “where ’everything’ is yet to be gained, stolen-even the distant light, the rays, a half-lightning that is not lightning. Then comes dawn, that feeling of stupid crescendo, with this beautiful untranslatable English word: incremental.” Not only that: the night is short (as always in Tocca’s painting, no people appear) but Poca notte is a score that keeps under track a man who shortens his sleep to watch, wandering in rooms, in the hallway and on the landing, things in suspension, where life, past and future, surfaces in silence and inertia.

Michele Tocca (Subiaco, Rome, 1983) studied painting in Italy, Belgium and the United Kingdom, where he completed an MA, Painting, at the Royal College of Art, London (2011). His paintings reflect on the experience of painting and the physical world, returning to questions about their mutual “actuality,” process and metaphor, realism and its paradoxes, and the effects of time and history. In this sense, Tocca has authored writings on the work of artists ranging from Thomas Jones to the present day.

In 2023, his work was the subject of an extensive solo exhibition at GAM in Turin, part of the acquisition of a core group of paintings. Recent exhibitions include: Pittura Italiana Oggi, Triennale, Milan; Positions 2, Alma Pearl, London; Paintings as Places, Torre Pallavicina; 63 Premio Termoli, MACTE, Termoli in 2023. Over the years, the artist has exhibited in institutions, galleries and independent spaces in Italy and abroad, including: FLAG ART Foundation, New York; FuoriCampo, Siena and Brussels; IUNO, Rome; Ipercorpo, Forlì; LNM, Praksis, Oslo 2019; MARCA, Catanzaro; Munange, Crissolo; Musei di Villa Torlonia, Rome; Moscow Biennale; Palazzo de’ Toschi, Bologna; Prague Biennale; Studiolo, Milan; z2o Sara Zanin, Rome.

Rome, at z2o Sara Zanin gallery the solo exhibition of Michele Tocca

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