HORTUS. Patience and grace on display at the OTTO Gallery in Bologna

Art has different potentialities, including making an idea, a concept concrete. This is exactly what happens in the exhibition HORTUS. Patience and Grace, running until December 21, 2024, at the OTTO Gallery in Bologna. The exhibition project, curated by Davide Benati (Reggio Emilia, 1949) is the second one that involves the curatorship of an artist appreciated by the gallery, after the previous one entitled Stazionari Altrove (2023), curated by Matteo Montani.

AA.VV. “HORTUS. La pazienza e la grazia”, room I, installation view, artworks by Davide Benati and Enrico Minguzzi, ph credit: Carlo Favero, courtesy OTTO Gallery, Bologna

Benati is the artist protagonist and creator of the project, who invited Gianni Dessì (Rome, 1955), Enrico Minguzzi (Cotignola, 1981) and Nicola Samorì (Forlì, 1977) to exhibit with him. Four artists with different poetics, but united by the care and patience they put into the creation of their works, the same care required for the cultivation of a Hortus, whether it is Conclusus, in the Medieval sense, or representing a garden with wonderful flowers and fruits. The expressive languages of the artists vary according to the different ways of interpreting the world, one’s own interior reality, reconciling contemporaneity and tradition, technique and thought, until the creation of a formal aesthetic balance, rich in meaning. Despite the different narrative plots, the works tell of a personal artistic experience, but shared both within the project and in the same vision of art. Interesting is the juxtaposition between the care put into cultivating the vegetable garden, the garden and the care that the artist expresses during the creation of the work of art, which like a flower or a fruit, comes to life following the attention lavished on the creative act.

Davide Benati, “Encantadas”, 2024, watercolor on canvas paper, 140 x 240 cm, ph credit Carlo Favero, courtesy OTTO Gallery, Bologna

As it is reported in the press release accompanying the exhibition: «The vegetable garden, a place where work transforms nature and produces fruit, and the ornamental garden, a lush place of peace, silence and beauty are symbolic spaces of perfect harmony between the natural world and the human intellect and lend themselves to being assimilated to the canvas and the painter’s practice. The work is the physical but also and above all spiritual and intellectual center of the artist, a place that requires work and patience. For the four artists, the Hortus becomes the metaphor of a modus operandi that unites them, deeply rooted in the practice of each, made of patience, slowness and care». Davide Benati, with the work Encantadas (2024) opens the exhibition path, immediately introducing the visitor to his most used technique: watercolour, through which he investigates the modalities linked to the appearance of the image. From observing the works it emerges that the use of this technique allows the reproduction of nature and forms in movement, with delicate, almost rarefied backgrounds, immersed in a silent but expressive pictorial plane, rich in literary evocations.

From the left: Enrico Minguzzi, “Calicante”, 2024, oil on canvas, 160 x 120 cm; Nicola Samorì, “Il tarlo Ellenico”, 2024, oil on walnut wood, 30 x 20 x 2 cm, ph credit Carlo Favero, courtesy OTTO Gallery, Bologna

A reference to nature and its forms is present in the works by Enrico Minguzzi, which welcome the viewer in the same room. Worlds immersed in a metaphysical atmosphere, such as in Calicante (2024), come to life in the artist’s interior, reaching out with gently swirling and ascending motions towards an orderly and silent verticality. The planes and perspective are defined by carefully selected colors, whose backgrounds, from the lightest to the most intense, marry and express the artist’s intention to represent his inner imagination. The works of Nicola Samorì follow in the gallery spaces, and with his art balanced between ancient and contemporary, life and suffering, phenomenological and ontological, he manages to express that pathos and tension typical of human feeling, stressing the representations, whether pictorial or sculptural, to the point of maximum feeling and participation of both the artist and the viewer. Samorì scratches, flays the painting, as in Tarlo Ellenico (2024), making evident the close connection between the creative thought and the perception of suffering and its presence in the world. In this way, the profound reflection present in each single work is even more evident, which is the result of a continuous meditation on the human condition.

AA.VV. “HORTUS. La pazienza e la grazia”, room III, installation view, artworks by Gianni Dessì and Nicola Samorì, ph credit Carlo Favero, courtesy OTTO Gallery, Bologna

Gianni Dessì in this exhibition presents abstract works, in line with his poetics, on the basis of which there is a predilection for the use of different materials, thanks to which he manages to express the complexity of concepts and thoughts, which he creates through different forms in movement in the pictorial space in dialogue with the spectator. The latter reaches out towards the work in order to perceive its essence, as it happens, for example, in relating to the work entitled Della pittura: l’oro (2020). In fact, thanks to the precise observation of the details, one can appreciate the multiple forms represented on the canvas and immersed in a golden space. The exhibition HORTUS. Patience and grace, therefore, born from the union of four complex and unique personalities, allows you to enjoy a particular aesthetic experience, from which the meticulous care linked to the creation of each individual work is evoked, simultaneously inviting the spectator to pay attention to the richness of the meanings suggested and proposed by art.

Info:
VV.AA. HORTUS. La pazienza e la grazia (Patience and grace)
12/10 – 21/12/2024
OTTO Gallery
Via d’Azeglio, 55 – Bologna BO
www.otto-gallery.it