Studio G7 inaugurated the exhibition season with Mariateresa Sartori’s solo show entitled Trees Home  Mum: the Venetian artist, who focuses her work on the artistic conceptualization of human tension towards a knowledge destined to be always incomplete because it is founded on hopelessly random bases, presents a recent project dedicated to the sick and elderly mother. A series of photos taken with a simple box with a pinhole reproduce objects, photographs and documents taken from the family home dialing sequences of finds in which the objectivity of evidence is lost and complicated in an emotional flow which solves the impartiality of original proceeding.

Childish drawings, dried flowers, pearls, hand-written texts on notebook paper and calculations no longer linked to their practical function line up in small squares interspersed with images of the trees that through their seasonal changes mention the time scan of this fragile narrative. If the past is the white noise of our consciousness, the artist tries to counter its unpredictable resonance isolating certain frequencies to interrogate them individually. By dematerializing her objects of affection in photographs which are deliberately ambiguous between the live recording and the scan of an image that already exists, the artist present them as a pulsating grayscale latency materializing the delicate texture of an uncertain sight between memory and dream. Amplifying and auscultating the seemingly insignificant details of a bygone everyday life Sartori rediscovers her personal roots to offer herself and her mother a new and extreme ability to know and recognize each other in the sharing of a common unconscious.

The real fact, when considered as a fragment of a memory that proceeds by metonymy and analogies according subjective coordinates of space and time, becomes the semantic presupposition and the cognitive verification of an inner life that resists all attempts at systematization.In this way the cataloguing played out by the artist accepts the constitutive elusiveness of the relationship human-world and it transforms into poetry its material debris to make them universally available. In absence of absolute arguments about the mystery of life and death the proof that world exists it is in the approximation between the constitutive partiality of the version of events recorded by subjective memory and the constant tension to overcome the insurmountable threshold of human finitude.

The exceeding limit is also the cornerstone of the two sound installations that accompany the images of the exhibition, transforming the vision into a compelling environmental experience. The first audio track, widespread in stereo from two speakers placed at opposing corners of the exhibition room, is entitled Questions. Bald heads that guard the sound of the mother’s voice and brings together the interrogative sentences recited by Ingrid Bergman in some of her most famous films in the Italian dubbed version by Lydia Simoneschi. The questions followed by silences and household noises become a metaphor for a painful long-distance dialogue between the mother, who is mute and distant because of the disease, and the daughter who tries to guess her thoughts associating them to the situations mentioned by the cinematic scenes. In the second recording to listen through headphones in a secluded niche the painful poem by Mariangela Gualtieri Prayer to her mother to die becomes a soliloquy of consciousness in which the unspeakable content is entrusted to a foreign narrator voice unaware of the terrible meaning of the words she utters.

Here, too, the artist uses mechanical and impersonal procedures to clear her authorship and bring the subjectivity of individual experience to an established order that despite its inscrutableness is the only possible pretext to metabolize the imminent and unacceptable loss. To Appoint, categorize, systematize and order are cognitive practices that assimilate the methodologies of conceptual art to those of science in the inexhaustible attempt to grasp the underlying reasons for our being in the world and soothe the suffering that all finiteness inevitably entails.

Mariateresa Sartori. Trees Home Mum
October 29, 2016 – January 14, 2017
Galleria Studio G7
Via val d’Aposa 4/A Bologna