Until 5 October 2024, it will be possible to visit ‘Etereo’, a solo show by Olga Lepri (Moscow, 1997), at the Calatia Archaeological Museum in Maddaloni, near Caserta, curated by Maria Giuseppa De Filippo. The exhibition presents works created, on paper and canvas, between 2018 and 2024, in the framework of the historical building, whose origins date back to the Renaissance period. The title is taken from one of the series on show, as well as from a kind of philosophical language, between scientific investigation and esotericism, which the exhibition is inspired by.
Olga Lepri, “Etereo”, exhibition view at Museo Archeologico Calatia, Maddaloni (CE), courtesy of the artist
In the ‘Corpi onirici’ series (2019), the drawing technique and the pictorial gesture are tuned. The human figures are represented as anatomical studies, made with graphite and deprived of cultural connotations, thus further emphasising the physicality of the bodies. The dreamlike connotation is given by the colour brushstrokes that create mental landscapes in which the individual appear suspended between spirit and matter. The human being is at the core of all the artworks in ‘Etereo’, sometimes more evidently, sometimes more hiddenly. This centrality appears to be the leitmotiv of Lepri’s research, which is particularly pertinent to the site chosen for the exhibition, given her Mannerist pictorial inclination. Contemporary with ‘Corpi onirici’ is the ‘Mercati’ series, in which the narrative approach persists. The subjects are caught in everyday, mundane actions, thus bringing the viewer back into an apparently tangible dimension, behind which traces of panism can be discerned, as it can be observed in ‘Smistatore di granchi’ (2018) and ‘Al lago’ (2019), where a fusion takes place between man and animal, between man and natural landscape. This panic tension is also inherent in the most recent work entitled ‘Caduta’ (2024), from which an evolution in the artist’s painting technique can be seen, and in which the organic, mollusc-like figure is given by the ensemble of moving bodies.
Olga Lepri, “Etereo”, exhibition view at Museo Archeologico Calatia, Maddaloni (CE), courtesy of the artist
On a single wall of the museum, there are thirty-two works on paper including drawings and small-format paintings, some of them designed as studies of the works on show. The installation choice is dictated mainly by two reasons; the first, more evident, is the reference to the historical mode of displaying art collections before the advent of the white cube; the second derives from Olga Lepri’s deconstructivist approach to the creation of her works. The reduction to minimum terms and the decomposition of the subject are the basis of an analytical process that precedes the work, subsequently returned as a composite result. Given these premises, the observer becomes able to read the process starting from the central drawings then arriving at the more peripheral ones, or vice versa.
Olga Lepri, “Etereo”, exhibition view at Museo Archeologico Calatia, Maddaloni (CE), courtesy of the artist
Among the main thematic cores is that of the blindness, expressed through the series with the same title (“Cecità”). It is a reflection on proprioception in which the artist seeks to go beyond the canonical representation of the blind, a presence that resides, moves and orients itself in the world through the use of other senses. The four works in the cycle proceed according to an order in which the human is not immediately manifested, but is gradually delineated from a shapeless mass, which is gradually moulded until it becomes a figure. Regarding this aspect, in the critical text that accompanies the exhibition, curator De Filippo writes: «the works in the exhibition are proposed as residual traces of a passage from the incorporeal state to the graphic state as epiphanies of signs, which in their appearance allow for an unusual perspective of elements such as the body, which, imagined in a new condition, is considered in its mechanism of proprioception».
Valeria De Siero
Info:
Olga Lepri. “Etèreo”
7/09 – 05/10/2024
curated by Maria Giuseppa De Filippo
Museo Archeologico di Calatia
Via Caudina 353, Maddaloni (CE)
www.museoarcheologicocalatia.beniculturali.it
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