Turin, at Mazzoleni's, Marinella Senatore's solo exhibition, Make it shine

From Nov. 2, 2021 to Jan. 29, 2022, Mazzoleni Gallery will host the exhibition Marinella Senatore: Make it Shine at its Turin location. This is the first solo exhibition of Marinella Senatore (Cava de’ Tirreni, 1977) in the gallery in Turin, a city the Campania-based artist considers a “laboratory” of avant-garde, experimentalism and activism. Mazzoleni, who represents Marinella Senatore in Italy and Europe, intends to pay tribute to one of Italy’s most internationally renowned artists, who has found the dynamic of exchange and sharing to be the cornerstone of her artistic research. Pursuing a creative practice that pivots on theaesthetics of resistance and the transformative power of social engagement, Senatore creates multidisciplinary projects (in the last year alone in Berlin, Rome, Graz, Amsterdam and at the São Paulo Biennale) whose main characteristic lies in the relationship between the artist and the communities she involves. Her artistic research reflects multidisciplinary training between the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, the Conservatory of Music and the National School of Cinema in Rome. The selection of works, most of which are previously unpublished, outlines an exhibition itinerary where individual elements are closely related to each other: a multiplicity of linguistic solutions, taking shape in light sculptures, installations, paintings, pencil drawings, collages and banners.

The artist’s distinctive use of vernacular images, processes and forms as a social and relational poetics is also found, throughout her practice, in her choice of language. Sources for quotations and texts range from the feminist context to the folk tradition to the artistic and literary spheres: this is the case with Dance First, Think Later, a quotation from Samuel Beckett, which is found in one of the light sculptures that open Mazzoleni’s exhibition. With these works, Senatore reworks Baroque rose windows and portals, inserting phrases and quotes related toempowerment, such as Remember the First Time You Saw Your Name, and the recognition of one’s identity. The sculptures redescribe the environment through their architecture, then offering it as a space of sharing and energy made manifest by light. For the first time, Marinella Senatore is making new neon sculptures, for which she has chosen to resort to mercury-free production, an innovative technology that makes it possible to produce lamps free of mercury, a highly polluting metal that is already banned in several European countries, thus guaranteeing their durability and future replicability. The new works also include the monumental pictorial installation Make it Shine, where the artist uses reflective and refractive materials such as mother-of-pearl, metal flakes and 24k gold, allowing light to sculpt the surface of the canvas.

Continuing, the exhibition showcases the Un Corpo Unico cycle: large polyptychs whose individual elements give rise to a unified figuration made up of images of dancing bodies, textual elements and iconographic elements belonging to the artist, such as the famous luminarias of the artisanal tradition of southern Italy. In the unprecedented collages, the artist reflects on universal themes such as social issues, gender differences, but above all the transformative capacity of the individual, through the use of materials taken from his archive: photographs of people and places, memories of installations or public actions, musical scores, botanical images, phrases and words. Inseparable from the artist’s practice is then drawing: the series It’ s Time to Go Back to the Street (2019) depicts street scenes where groups of people are engaged in peacefully reclaiming urban space, asserting their rights or manifesting themselves through artistic language.

For the creation of the embroidered banners, which the artist often uses in his participatory projects, Senatore relies from time to time on local artisanship where he can be found intervening to stitch mottos, excerpts from popular songs and poems. These large banners take up the tradition of gonfalons on the one hand, and the large textile posters of the labor movement and workers unions on the other. In this way he combines very different systems but using the textile element as an aggregative constant. Also in the Self-Portrait cycle it is possible to find the characteristic pictorial checkerboards, multiple canvases composing each work. In this case we are invited to a reflection on the theme of self-representation. On the ceiling of the same room, a reflective surface with the artist’s hands reproduced in bronze in the center allows viewers to reflect themselves. The work also titled Self-Portrait becomes a metaphor for the artist welcoming into himself the multitude of spectators, who in turn participate in the work in an expanded dialectic of encounter and exchange. For this work Senatore recalls Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, in which we read the phrase I contain multitudes, which we find in another sculpture in the exhibition and which reinforces the artist’s desire to create that “one body” between her and the visitors, that communal sense that unites all the works in the exhibition.

“Marinella Senatore,” say Davide and Luigi Mazzoleni, “represents an added value within the gallery’s path and to its recent expansion towards contemporary art. Senatore’s approach is a complex and articulated, highly innovative process that finds its place between visual and performing arts. We were very impressed by his way of proposing a broad and polyvalent dialogue in which art is a catalyst of emotions and energies.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog with critical text by Tenley Bick, Assistant Professor of Global Contemporary Art, Department of Art History, Florida State University. More information about the exhibition can be found on Mazzoleni’s website.

Image: Marinella Senatore, One Body.

Turin, at Mazzoleni's, Marinella Senatore's solo exhibition, Make it shine

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