The exhibition is realised due to the collaboration of: Archivio Grifi (Rome), Tonini Bruno Studio Bibliografico (Gustavo, BS) and REPLICA – Archivio italiano del libro d’artista (Milan)
I have to carry out a gesture of…
This unfinished sentence, on a folded white sheet of paper, a piece by Giuseppe Chiari, raises a query that runs by your complete exhibition: what are the gestures we really feel compelled to carry out? What marks can we want to go away, and what marks can we go away behind, unintentionally?
Gesto e Segno takes the type of a visible manifesto that explores the creative gesture and mark in numerous registers: bodily, political, playful, poetic and aesthetic. On this dialectic, the exhibition explores the psychological and dynamic expression of the physique by actions which are at instances emphatic, at different instances minimal and a part of the on a regular basis, and infrequently charged with a deep sense of political pressure and revolt.
Regardless of their obvious semantic proximity, gesture and mark reveal basically completely different natures and capabilities: gestures are spontaneous and uncoded acts, rooted in corporeality and emotion. They will accompany and even exchange verbal language. Marks, in contrast, are principally typical and codified components with recognisable meanings inside techniques. But marks, too, can seem ungrounded—as a pure presence, as an act that merely is—very similar to poetic language, which strives to talk the unspeakable, to suggest past signification itself.
The works on show articulate this twin nature by interweaving modern practices and poetics with archival paperwork, movies and visible supplies in a constellation of interconnecting meanings.
In Lucia Leuci’s work In the past (TN: Needle), the act of stitching emerges as a symbolic gesture: a bronze needle that, by way of a golden thread, weaves a community between margins, mends, connects—evoking not solely the act of caring, however the very chance of sewing again each materials and symbolic fractures. Ideally, this gesture is linked to that of strolling, materialised in Calpestio e pozzanghera (TN: Tread and Puddle), a path drawn onto a grid of cobblestones. For Leuci, the asphalt with its cracks and fissures turns into a metaphor for the wounded floor of the city cloth. These cracks assert their marginal situation, demand consideration, search recognition. Strolling turns into an act of corporeal writing, a hint concurrently imprinted in reminiscence and house.
The identical impression runs by Alberto Grifi’s movie Il viaggio con Patrizia (TN: The journey with Patrizia), an intimate love diary lengthy left unpublished. Right here, the pictures are imbued with a peculiar temporal suspension: they seem, vanish, re-emerge after an inaccessible interval—too private to be totally revealed. It’s the suspended time of a love affair, conveyed by the digicam’s lingering gaze on the physique of Patrizia Vicinelli. These gestures are projected into a unique timeframe, which dilates and transcends the same old rhythms of visible notion, expressing itself by a poetic dimension. A phonetic poetry, that of Patrizia Vicinelli, entrusted to the voice as a main corporeal instrument. It shouts fragmented and unrecognisable phrases, damaged into syllables, deserted to sheer breath.
Our existence unfolds within the dialectic interaction between gesture and mark: to carry out a gesture, to depart a mark. These gestures inscribe themselves on the physique, they mark it. In Azione Sentimentale (TN: Sentimental Motion), Gina Pane concurrently performs a symbolic and bodily act, imprinting a political mark of protest that evokes each non secular martyrdom and the stereotypes imposed on girls by patriarchal societies—as brides, wives and moms. A rose, in her work, transcends its decorative nature and turns into a weapon. Simply as a gesture of affection can bear inside it a mark of violence.
Within the works of Lucia Leuci, Patrizia Vicinelli and Gina Pane, creative and poetic marks take form as performative gestures and phrases change into embodied by bodily motion.
On this labyrinth of gestures crystallised into marks, portray turns into a pure vacation spot for tracing distinctive and instinctive marks. This dimension lies on the core of Pesce Khete and Marco Salvetti’s analysis, whose works discover the tensions between signal, color and pictorial gesture.
For Khete, drawing has all the time been the core of his day by day creative follow: marks traced like a rhythmically paced musical rating, a punctuation of a deadly writing by which the sport typically consists of forcing the bounds of the road itself. The mark, because the artist states, “is merely a place to begin for my discourse—or, at any fee not one thing I really feel notably hooked up to. It’s, greater than something, a necessity, and at worst, kind of a (physiological) constraint”.
His portray is computerized, concurrently summary and figurative, the place the mark turns into a drawing the second it takes on the looks of an object, imaginary or actual.
In Salvetti’s work, the brushstroke seems intentionally unbounded: the contours could blur, but the gesture retains depth—certainly, it’s assertive, typically violent and intentionally crude. Every portray is an allegory of portray itself—a discipline of pressure between building and collapse. These are marks born of stressed gestures, of a cussed drive to dig, although not with the intention of consuming the floor completely. “So what’s portray, then?” Salvetti asks himself in a dialog with Luca Bertolo. He solutions:
“I stroll, I dig, I unearth, I begin once more. I solely set sail in unhealthy climate. I’ve been going through storms in a puddle for years”.
Different works within the exhibition current gesture as a playful act. Adriano La Licata explores unpredictable, performative actions within the works Jingle Man (Una concentrazione di eventi) and Thresholds (Fingers). Elastic bands thrown onto canvas or different helps type likelihood compositions or hint the define of the artist’s physique, reworking the act of play into a visible hint.
Right here, bodily power is transferred on to the item, imprinting the physique’s presence onto the floor. This isn’t merely portray, bu efficiency and print—these elastic bands are used like stamps.
The thought originates from a private reminiscence: a childhood sport, lengthy hours in main faculty spent capturing elastic bands at a friend-accomplice in a kind of improvised slingshot. However this infantile gesture can also be an act with conceptual, linguistic and tautological connotations. The firing of the elastics recollects the photographic “shot”—to shoot — a time period that comprises an inherent ambiguity between play and violent pressure. La Licata additionally transforms the shot right into a repetitive, meditative gesture that focuses the thoughts on a single level, making every shot a alternative, every influence a signature.
Playful and psychedelic, but concurrently political, are the indicators of Giordano Falzoni. The work on show presents itself iconically as a butterfly however clearly alludes to Rorschach’s inkblots: these symmetrical, apparently meaningless figures used within the well-known psychodiagnostic check to discover a person’s character. For Falzoni, nonetheless, these should not diagnostic instruments, however butterflies—emblems of metamorphosis and multiplication, of a type that doubles and transforms.
“All the pieces that lives,” says the artist in Il grande freddo, “divides like a seed from which two little leaves are born. I consider an egg tree, which is a bit just like the starry sky, born from the multiplication of an egg.”
It’s this imaginative and prescient that leads portray again to an authentic, proliferating act—the place color multiplies by the gesture of urgent, producing a polychromatic, shimmering universe stuffed with mild and perceptual tensions. A “butterverse”, because the artist calls it, that doubles itself with each visible encounter. Falzoni asks: “How can the painter multiply color?” The reply—without delay easy and visionary—lies within the gesture itself: “In case you crush eggs of color, small quantities of various color collectively, you’ll get an infinite multiplication of shades.”
In Giuseppe De Mattia’s efficiency Senza pane senza matita (TN: With out Bread With out Pencil), the on a regular basis gesture of consuming turns into the main focus. The efficiency was born from a situation of impossibility: for fourteen days, the artist discovered himself unable to attract. The necessity to discover an alternate device arises from an opportunity encounter: a burnt slice of bread, instantly recognised as a attainable substitute for charcoal. From that intuitive second, De Mattia begins to attract with the bread itself, utilizing it each as topic and instrument. The identical slice is used to attract itself—in an virtually tautological act.
The burnt bread thus replaces the pencil, giving rise to a primordial and mandatory gesture that transfigures the atypical into the extraordinary, reworking bodily nourishment into aesthetic sustenance: as soon as once more, the dialectic between bodily necessity and the manufacturing of marks.
Made in Germany marks the start of De Mattia’s broader reflection on mark-makin and the reuse of archival supplies. The hyperlink with writing devices is central, as evidenced by his visits to Bologna’s historic Casa della Penna (TN: Home of the Pen)—a store specialising in writing and drawing instruments. There, the act of the shopkeeper testing a pen – getting it began, making an attempt out its line—turns into for De Mattia a second of formal remark.
The artist collects the check sheets the place these preliminary indicators stay impressed—technical, mechanical, virtually calligraphic gestures that resemble little curls. De Mattia is especially hooked up to those indicators, that are initially unconscious: traces born from the intention to write down, but which change into autonomous drawings. On this follow, the paradox of the orthographic signal is revealed—one which originated in drawing and, by a protracted evolution, has been decreased to a mere typical communicative operate. De Mattia reactivates its visible dimension, reaffirming its poetic and plastic worth.
A collection of volumes from the REPLICA archive completes the exhibition, setting up a visible atlas of gestures and marks in artwork, broadening the sphere of reflection: from the performative and conceptual gestures informed in Come rubare libri (How you can Steal Books) by David Horvitz, to the city and political indicators of Il sistema disequilibrante (The Unbalancing System) by Ugo La Pietra; from the Dadaist collages of Baruchello in La quindicesima riga (The Fifteenth Line)to the verbo-visual and concrete poetry of Ugo Carrega, Arrigo Lora Totino, Henry Chopin, Mario Diacono, Adriano Spatola and the pictograms of Luisella Carretta.
This exploration of gesture and mark—throughout a number of languages and thru an method that intertwines physique, reminiscence, phrases and matter—presents a mirrored image on the potential of each motion to depart a hint, and on how each hint retains, in its darkest depths, the echo of a gesture.
In affirming the centrality of the physique as a main device of data and communication, the exhibition conveys the concept all marks—wether pictorial, performative, poetic or political—comprise the reminiscence of the gesture that produced them, and invitations us to contemplate the inherently political nature of each hint: to decide on to depart an indication is to affirm one’s presence on the earth, to say house, to change—even when minimally—the encompassing actuality.
From the on a regular basis gesture of strolling to that of the performative act, from the act of portray to the intimacy of poetry—all of it stands as a attainable response to Giuseppe Chiari’s unfinished crucial with which the exhibition opens: I have to carry out a gesture of [ . . . ]
Collaborating artists:
Adriano La Licata, Alberto Grifi, Gina Pane, Giuseppe Chiari, Giuseppe De Mattia, Giordano Falzoni, Pesce Khete, Lucia Leuci, Marco Salvetti, Patrizia Vicinelli
Curated by:
Simona Squadrito
at Société Interludio, Turin
till August 31, 2025
