The Drawing of Dust

curated by Eleonora Frattarolo

Gambalunga Palace Galleria dell’Immagine – Cloister – Ancient Halls via Gambalunga, April 28th – July 15th 2018

Il Disegno della Polvere”, by Eleonora Frattarolo, is an exhibition about what we were and what we will be, about what surrounds us and is often imperceptible, about what is both the fruit of disintegration and the generator of new life.

It’s an exhibition about dust and its different aspects, be it the sterile residue of broken matter or the molecular aggregate that creates bodies and substances, the continuum between memory and oblivion, the holistic dynamics that connect the Earth to the Cosmos, the stellar dust to the breath of plants, makers of reproductive pollens. Dust which cloaks the bodies of things and binds them with an impalpable force, dust which exists in-between our vision that blurs the contours of shape as in a dream or memory. Unaware, we are immersed in dust, a vital (or mortal) humus, and dust is what modernity uses to give an ephemeral body to artwork and confront the crisis around the idea of “duration”. The exhibition takes place in the historic Palazzo Gambalunga, in the heart of Rimini’s historic centre, starting in two large halls that constitute the Gallery of Images, where visitors will begin to follow the trail of the “Disegno della Polvere” with Vanni Spazzoli alongside his painted and drawn work, vast sheets full of scoring an pictorial representations that form pulverized alphabets, vortexes of codified syntagma suspended in time and space, between apparition and disappearance. Up next, Maria Elisabetta Novello, who intervenes with a site specific work of such semantic and aesthetic strength to, as always in her work, oppose the feebleness of the material in question, as the Artist has always worked with ashes from different woods, which fire has consumed, producing differently coloured residues. Immediately after, in the Cloister, denoted by its particular airiness and clarity in its building materials, we find Gonzalo Borondo’s installation, regarding optical multiplication and the fusion/confusion of perception of a female figure, drawn on 12 large glass plates, which inserts itself into the psyche and the realm of memory, like an illusory dream.

Then, in the five splendid historic halls on the first floor, where the oldest heart of the precious Palazzo Gambalunga Library is preserved, we’re introduced to a tightly closed voyage, in the lands of a poetic dimension which is the symbolic and representative incipit, of a numerous “spiritual family” of sublime watercolours, drawing, and engravings by Giorgio Morandi, who made dust part of his pictorial art, interpreted as the “veil of time” born by objects in life, transforming thus meaning and shape.

In the second room we find the cartographies of stellar dusts, galaxies, and cosmic magnetisms by Federico Murgia, alongside Silvia Zagni’s installation of large vases whose rusts have gone from red to different shades of gloomy darkness, having drank the essence of iron and broken it down into pieces, and then into dust. In the third room, along the perimeter, lay Raffaele Iacono’s “rotuli” made with the smoke from candles, conceptual and archaic icons where the breadth of the paper captures the tremblingly ephemeral blackness of combustion and in the centre, we find the sculptures of Paolo Migliazza, adolescent figures that “hear” the world, bodies created by dust and charcoal mixed with pigments and air, completing their essence and lending them words and symbolic strength. In the fourth room, there are the dust-covered surfaces upon which Franco Pozzi inscribes barely visible symbols of an unspeakable lightness, which end with some of Giorgio Morandi’s sketches and watercolours. Lastly, there is Raffaello Bassotto’s photography, which portray reliquaries containing bits of Saints’ bodies, held in deep dark churches; they are works in decorated gold, of embellished inlays and engravings, bundles of stories, of lives, of rituals which photography makes live again by illuminating their surfaces, aesthetic harmonies, and material craftsmanship.