MOTO ONDOSO STABILE
Neil Gall, Rezi van Lankveld, Jinn Bronwen Lee, Nazzarena Poli Maramotti,
Alessandro Sarra, Jessica Warboys
curated by Davide Ferri
Moto ondoso stabile (Average Waves in Unprotected Waters) is a show that includes works by Jinn Bronwen Lee, Neil Gall, Rezi van Lankveld, Nazzarena Poli Maramotti, Alessandro Sarra, Jessica Warboys and it provides an occasion for fresh reflection on certain specific aspects of the medium of painting, beginning from the suggestion offered by the title – taken from a short story by Anne Tyler – and recalls the drawing of waves, an evenly rippled sea, and therefore the idea of an irregular surface permeated by irrepressible, continuous movement.
Work after work, Moto ondoso stabile is traversed by such movement, which is translated into unstable, jagged surfaces, clots of gestures and brushstrokes capable of generating vaguely indescribable forms and figures that emerge as presences and apparitions in a disarticulated and inhomogeneous space (no longer organically coherent in classical sense) that are apparently abstract, multicentric.
The show includes works that evoke a figuration supported by a simply unintended, playful or automatic approach, emerging almost unwittingly; a figuration that is in dialogue with the dimension of the painting as object and reinterprets it; an idea of impermanent definition and temporariness, of combat with the image, of balance or contrast between the qualities and the structure of the supports and the signs and brushstrokes on the surface, as if their rhythmic progression were reacting with the support’s material nature like a subterranean current.
Moto ondoso stabile offers us paintings by Rezi van Lankveld, whose figures are transient apparitions, fragments that detach from a liquid magmatic surface like tectonic plates adrift; Jessica Warboys’ Sea Paintings, large, loose canvases coated with pigment and then soaked in the sea, that reflect the uncontrolled and instable movements of nature; Alessandro Sarra’s layered boards, false monochromes with lines and scratchings on the surface that reveal glints of the colors underneath; Neil Gall’s paintings, which translate certain works/textural experiments (sculptures of paper and adhesive tape, collages, overlays of cutouts of newspaper and wrapping paper that represent the material and theoretical basis of the painting’s fabrication process) to an apparently stratified surface using a photo/pictorial approach; Jinn Bronwen Lee’s works , where the shape of the paintings – a series of small-sized ovals – determines the development of the brushstrokes – some more assertive, others more extemporaneous, and the erasures and reconsiderations – which condense into lively compositions vaguely ascribable to painting’s classic genres; and paintings by Nazzarena Poli Maramotti, whose images appear after a long combat to bring the values of density and volatility of certain 18th century frescoes to light with heavens and clouds at the center and figures relegated to the painting’s margins in the painting.
