Fondazione Zucchelli was established in 1959 in Bologna with the aim of supporting the training of students of the Academy of Fine Arts and the Conservatory of Music through scholarships, talent awards and other initiatives aimed at increasing the visibility of their work, with a view to supporting their professional entry into the field of visual arts and music. With reference to the first area, since 2022, the annual call for applications at the end of which the beneficiaries of the grants are identified has been enriched with the strengthening of the collaboration with the cultural association Alchemilla, already a partner of the foundation as the host of the “Residenze Studio” project, which now offers its spaces to the second-ranked young artist of the call for applications for a three-month residency culminating in a public show. The young artists, supported by the curatorial team of Alchemilla, are therefore encouraged to engage with a large and strongly characterised environment such as the eighteenth-century halls of Palazzo Vizzani, the headquarters of the association. The challenge coincides with the precious opportunity to experiment their poetics still in the definition phase with a fascinating, complex and aesthetically stratified venue, hopefully the first stage of a career that will see many others.
Giacomo Mallardo with the sculpture “It’s time to shine” in Alchemilla
The protagonist of the ongoing residency, which until September 28 will show the public the results of his site-specific research is Giacomo Mallardo (2000, Bra), winner of the second prize of the Zucchelli Competition 2024 and guest of the association from June to September 2024. The spaces of Alchemilla are not new to the artist: in 2023 he was involved (together with Chiara Marchesi and Ylenia Joiner Santurio) in the exhibition “Ø” curated by Ivana Spinelli during Opentour, an annual festival in which the city’s exhibition spaces conclude their exhibition program before the summer break by hosting artworks made by students of the Academy, another virtuous demonstration of synergy between public and private institutions in Bologna in the promotion of emerging artists. Again for Opentour, two of his works were present in the exhibition “L’Ospite atteso: il limes attivo dell’esporsi” by the artistic collective 30023-BO at Kappa Noun, a space managed by the collector Marco Ghigi. If on these two occasions the artist, a student of the two-year course in Sculpture – Visual Arts, had presented sculptural works made with soft materials that established an intriguing relationship with the exhibition locations played on a minimal ambivalence between mimicry and discontinuity, a year later the same characteristics appear nourished by a more mature and multifaceted speculative awareness.
Giacomo Mallardo, “Shinig out of nowhere”, 2024, diptych, print on photographic paper, courtesy of the artist and Fondazione Zucchelli
The starting point of this evolution can already be identified in the winning work of the competition, the photographic diptych “Shinig out of nowhere”, not included in the exhibition but visible in the studio-laboratory where Mallardo worked during the summer months. The two images portray details of what we imagine to be historical architectures, made evanescent by a post-production that, visually assimilating them to incorporeal reverberations, shows how his research now focuses on the intrinsic luminosity and pure aesthetic value of a form that, while aiming to be abstract, does not lose its relevance to the space from which it emanates. The theme of light and the conception of the work as a poetic extension of an environment are still crucial in the final exhibition of the residency, entitled “Lucciole” and curated by the young Olivia Teglia. Confirming the new direction of Mallardo’s research, here too the photographic medium used in a sculptural sense has the same importance as sculpture strictly understood and the two practices appear to have in common the oxymoronic assimilation of the immateriality of light with a sort of structure that identifies and rewrites the visual keystones of an environment.
Giacomo Mallardo, “Shinig out of nowhere/Bling!”, 2024, diptych, print on photographic paper, courtesy of the artist
In the photographic prints of the “Shining out of nowere” series the spaces of Alchemilla are allusively evoked by blurred images that capture luminous details of the rooms (such as the reflection of the surface of a coffee table, the ornament of a chandelier or the glass of a window), made unrecognizable by a graininess obtained with a close zoom to the point of evaporating the detail into a new form in its own right, to which real space is again conceptually anchored. All the photographs, except for a night shot of the lights of distant houses on the horizon, were made on site, like the sculptural intervention “It’s time to shine”, in which three large stars in diamond-plated aluminum appear inscribed in a structure that recalls a sports finish line or a commercial advertising sign. This humble material, usually used in the construction sector for non-slip flooring and ramps, is here ennobled by the emphasis on the light refractions that its surface is able to trigger, confirming the artist’s interest in a poetic valorization of materials based on careful observation of their physical properties.
Giacomo Mallardo, “It’s time to shine”, 2024, diamond-cut aluminum, painted aluminum, aluminum tubes, courtesy of the artist
The theme of shining and the morphological allusion to the finish line also introduce the more autobiographical theme that underlies the exhibition, in which Mallardo tries to restore both the space, in an approach that we could call “differently objective”, and his individual existential experience within it, in this case linked to the residency (the result of a competition between artists) and to his condition as an emerging artist committed to taking his first steps in a highly selective world such as that of contemporary art. The photographic triptych “L’oro è solo giallo, stupidamente giallo” (Gold is only yellow, stupidly yellow) recalls this context with intelligent irony, the title of which quotes a phrase from a text by Ettore Sottsass. The artist’s half-open mouth, this time in sharp focus, is framed here, embellished with a custom-made silver tooth jewel, which on the one hand alludes to his second placement in the competition, and on the other resumes the reflection on materials, highlighting, with a mental process opposite and complementary to the one implemented in the sculptural installation, how the value assigned to some of them is nothing more than a conventional construct.
Giacomo Mallardo, “L’oro è solo giallo, stupidamente giallo”, triptych, 2024, photographic print on paper, courtesy of the artist
The exhibition ends with the simulation of a sort of backstage dressing room wrapped in darkness, where we see a bedside table lit by a table lamp on which the cast of the artist’s teeth with silver jewel-like prostheses rests inside an empty glass. The installation recreates a moment of intimacy, in which Mallardo can lay himself bare at the end of his work, placing his trophy away because in the solitude of the night he no longer needs to show his teeth and be ferocious to emerge in the daily competition for success. But the suspension of competitive tension is only temporary and a new day is already lurking: on the surface of the bedside table it is engraved a high-sounding motivational phrase (a contribution by the artist Federico Grilli) that he will have to repeat three times upon awakening to find the strength to «aspire to the supreme with superb audacity».
Info:
Zucchelli Competition Residency 2024 – Giacomo Mallardo
15/06 – 15/09/2024
Lucciole: Open studio by Giacomo Mallardo
Curated by: Olivia Teglia
On reservation until September 28: info@alchemilla43.it
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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