/ Italy
404. porta coeli contemporary art programme prize
Reveal or disappear, defend or offer ourself vulnerable, analyze to understand the general or shatter it irretrievably to the point of illegibility. Transdisciplinary, open-ended paths, laden with uncertainties and instances for the future. In a transversal look at the history of artistic languages, they work on the minutiae, the refinements, the parcelizations, to arrive at a processuality of extraordinary specificity that is intimately connected with a specific sense of being in the present time. They condense a precise and strategically “weak,” melancholic and non-interventionist position of reacting and acting in times of crisis.
Figura intera 13032023, 2023
off camera photography
cm 120 × 120
Francesca Piovesan (1981) was born in Aviano (Pordenone). She holds a degree in Decoration from the Academy of fine arts in Venice. She was a finalist for the Exibart Prize (2023), Lynx Prize (2019), Fabbri Prize (2013), and winner of the Camum Prize (2015). She has exhibited in major institutions in Europe, including in Gudhjem (Denmark), Rijeka (Croatia), Cetinje (Montenegro), Tirana (Albania), as well as Villa Torlonia (Rome), Museo Pino Pascali (Polignano a mare), Magazine del sale 3 (Venice). He has three solo exhibitions to his credit, in Rome and Milan. Figura intera 13032023 is a reflection on the original meaning of analog photography, made of traces and evidence of presence. The image, in this case, emerges, however, without the mediation of a photographic device: an adhesive tape takes a trace of the artist’s skin and then brings it to react with silver nitrate. Piece by piece, in a mosaic or kaleidoscope, a contact portrait of the “whole figure” (this is the meaning of the title) of the artist is produced, at once precise and unreliable, human and dehumanized. The two sensitive surfaces, photographic and human, chemical and biological, establish an absurd relationship of impossible reciprocity.
Deimatico, 2021
performance action no. zero,10′ 5 photo frames Hahnemühle paper
cm 20 × 30
photographies by Massimiliano Camellini
Alice Padovani was born in Modena (1979). A graduate in Philosophy and Visual arts, after working in the field of contemporary theater she devoted herself to visual arts. Her works are part of some important collections, including Museo civico di Modena, Reggia di Caserta, MuDi Taranto. Not tied to a preferred medium, Padovani’s research creates wunderkammer and taxonomies, between wonder and analysis, rapture and anatomization, with an approach he calls “neo-seventeenthcentury”. She talks, in essence, about the way humans represent themselves in the world through the sometimes-cruel cultural devices they employ to produce representations of it. The performance Deimatico (Deimatic)is also one of those actions that reveal human projections onto the sphere of the natural: the artist, crouching, is covered with thorns, recalling the archetypal function of defense, of precariousness, of that which announces danger because it experiences danger. This skin will gradually be peeled off the body, and with it the thorns: is the self under those thorns, or are the thorns themselves part of the self? What happens when after this release we offer our vulnerability to the world?