Rome, Di luce e di fango: Alfredo Pirri's first exhibition in z2o gallery spaces

It is entitled Di luce e di fango (Of light and mud), the solo exhibition of Alfredo Pirri (Cosenza, January 25, 1957) curated by Cecilia Canziani and Davide Ferri. The exhibition occupies both exhibition spaces of the z2o gallery on Via della Vetrina and Via Baccio Pontelli, articulating in a specular way around a pair of opposite terms, which allow the artist’s entire research to be reread in terms of its relationship with the space inside and outside the work, through movements that have to do with breathing and expansion, sinking and levitation.

Light and mud refer not only to two materials, the one aerial, the other viscous, but also to specific places: the wall and the vertical as the space of painting, the floor as the place of sculpture to which correspond the plots of the gaze within the image and in space. For Alfredo Pirri, light is always a material capable, like sound, of dilating and constructing space. In this exhibition in both venues, two large installations explore this aspect through two different intuitions: in Via della Vetrina, welcoming in the last room an unseen installation in which large papers engraved and painted through a process of immersion in color, cosmic images or sound maps, are set in a wooden score that sometimes appears as a pure structure, sometimes as a space carried by the painting. The idea of autonomy of place proper to these works poised between painting, sculpture, and architecture is complicated and reaffirmed through a further layering of Plexiglas panels that rest on portions of paintings, making the main room of the gallery a conceptual space.

This spatial tension imprinted from a specific declination of the luminous matter of color is counterpointed in the other rooms by works from earlier decades: Untitled Two Horizons from 2005, in dialogue with Strada di bandiere from 1996, a flagpole painted in opaque, deep black, bent to compose a circular shape, which brings the gaze back to the ground, and a series of “untitled” framed papers from 1985, an unpublished work in which the darkness of the black background obtained with bodywork paint is ripped open by sudden flashes.

At the Via Baccio Pontelli venue, the exhibition unfolds around 2019’s Companions and Angels, an installation of centripetally shaped Plexiglas panels that abolishes the differences between inside and outside, and can potentially expand into a here and now of the viewer’s experience. Arranged around this architecture are again the papers from 1985, a counterpoint between light and dark and a trait d’union between the two venues, a series of papers painted with metals from 2013, and finally the preparatory drawings for the last presentation of Passi in the courtyard of the Chiostro del Bramante in Rome.

Gallery opening hours: Monday through Saturday, 1 to 7 p.m.

Opening hours z2o project: by appointment only

For information: T. +39 06 70452261 / info@z2ogalleria.it / www.z2ogalleria.it

Rome, Di luce e di fango: Alfredo Pirri's first exhibition in z2o gallery spaces

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