XNL Piacenza inaugurates Art program with work-exhibition by Francesco Simeti

From September 23, 2022 to January 29, 2023, Francesco Simeti ’s (Palermo, 1968) exhibition entitled come un limone lunare, curated by Paola Nicolin, officially kicks off the Art program of XNL Piacenza, the Center for Contemporary Art, Cinema, Theater and Music of the Foundation of Piacenza and Vigevano, under the Artistic Direction of Paola Nicolin.

come un limone lunare intends to be a work-exhibition in line with Francesco Simeti’s research, which for years has been growing an archive of images drawn from the most disparate sources: from newspaper pages to herbaria, from Renaissance notebooks to rural iconography, from agricultural and botanical manuals to essays on ornithology and natural sciences. Images that collectively draw a visual heritage of the landscape, neglected and wounded, where extras and gestures are repeated in an economy of relationships that is not yet fully understood. Alongside a heterogeneous selection of works, including collages, wallpapers, sculptures, ceramic objects, installations and public works, the result of more than two decades of reflections on the nature of images, the artist also brings to Piacenza a new work, designed specifically for XNL’s contemporary arts galleries: a scenic, immersive machine, created by collecting images from digital databases for the sale of photographic content, with the intention of offering the public a reflection on nature and what drives the purchase of images. The artist brings to life a set design, a deliberately rudimentary contraption that moves glossy images, representations of nature that are extremely real, like a blade of grass, but at the same time artificial because they are presented in the form of a photograph.

Simeti restores within this new narrative themes dear to his research: the environmental crisis, the drama of conflicts and the resulting displacement of people, the co-presence of real and artificial, past and future, physical and digital.

The exhibition is enriched over time by an artist’s atelier specially conceived by Francesco Simeti and developed during the exhibition by Enrica Carini. The in-depth public program on the contents of the project is curated by EnLaboratoriocollettivo.

Image: Francesco Simeti, exhibition set-up as a lunar lemon, 2022 (XNL Piacenza) Photo by Daniele Signaroldi. Courtesy of XNL Piacenza.

XNL Piacenza inaugurates Art program with work-exhibition by Francesco Simeti

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