A journey through the very concept of matter, space and, above all, color. Vedere dentro, a solo show by Chiara Gambirasio, open to the public from June 21^st at Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting, in Milan, stands as a continuum of the previous Istruzioni di volo (Flight instructions), the artist’s solo exhibition at the Museo del Novecento in Florence, curated by Sergio Risaliti. Gambirasio, artist born in 1996, has created for this exhibition several new works, including the series Cosmo in vaso, installations of natural and unexpected shapes, which play the role of real lenses, filters that introduce a unique dimension, in its own right, characterized by its own irreproducible space and color. The exhibition, curated by Gabi Scardi, is a further exploration of the reflections of Gambirasio, a very interesting artist with whom I have had the pleasure of engaging in a dialogue….

Edoardo Durante: A fundamental aspect of your artistic production is the attempt to represent the world, the dimension in which we live, through colors; a research that you have been developing for some time and that has led you to coin the term “kenoscromia”. Would you like to elaborate on this concept?
Chiara Gambirasio: It is a term that I introduced in the moment in which I tried to close the work that I had been dealing with for some time. When we talk about emptiness (kenos) we refer to the most distant condition from the concept of color, emptiness is indeed the non-color. On the contrary, this lemma encapsulates a condition of inner emptiness, that allows us to see something external through color; to encode reality through color by understanding something new about nature, about what we see. Some people approach this process with numbers, measuring the space, weighing it or looking at it in relation to the context. I do it through color; the color relationship of a composition is my way of seeing the world.

So you represent the world through colors….
Not exactly, the term “to represent” is not so close to my practice. I prefer to remove the prefix “rep” from the term representation, thus referring to the Duchampian revolution of presentation. Making a further deviation, I stay with the term sentation, by which I refer to the act of thinking through feelings. I keep two different realities together; mine is a practice, not a theory.

How did you decline the attempt to read reality through colors with the exhibition Istruzioni di volo in Florence? I found extremely interesting the recontextualization of a sort of medieval bestiary and all the magical and mysterious connotations that this object represents…
Coming back from the Florentine residency program at Manifattura Tabacchi, I had just started a series of works that involved the constant presence of plaster. It has been a work in close contact with the space, the installation phase in particular was a key stage of the “project” (I don’t like the term “project” to describe my modus operandi). Some works were displayed along the stairs, in unusual spaces, as if they somehow challenged the public’s attention.

Now I would like to know how the title of the exhibition came about.
I worked closely with Cristina Muccioli, a critic with whom I noticed the presence of a constant element in my artworks: the research for a mediation between the elements of earth and sky. This is precisely why within the representational space there are often winged elements; I call them mercurial. Mercury is a figure that has always fascinated me since he is in constant oscillation between the heavenly and earthly dimensions, yet without belonging to either. Istruzioni di volo does not speak: it is a silent exhibition that develops through a slow walk, a slow movement from the bottom to the top.

We have talked a lot about color and painting, but your artworks often develop through an installation form, and the concept of space is definitely fundamental; you have shown me works with fractures, others exposed on the ground. How important is the material aspect and how important is the concept of space?
The relationship between matter and color is fundamental because I don’t think it is possible to consider them as separate concepts from each other. For me, a color exists because it is related to that particular material. If that given color were to be applied to another context, one cannot certainly assume that the result will be the same. This for me is the point of interaction between painting and sculpture, between the pictorial world and the more strictly installation and spatial aspect: the “broken” elements hold within the material something of a time that has now passed or stopped, just like in a kind of static dimension.

Edoardo Durante

Info:

Chiara Gambirasio, Vedere dentro
21/06/2022 – 17/09/2022
Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting
Via Settembrini 17, 20124 Milano