BEATRICE PEDICONI
9’/Unlimited
Collezione Maramotti
October 6, 2013 > January 31, 2014
The work of Beatrice Pediconi is charged with mystery and amazement, and the gesture she performs isn’t less capable of generation than attuned to capturing and accepting the unexpected: advance and retreat, action and perception.
Her work bears witness to the possibility of another form of painting: painting that “mutates” not on the canvas, but in water, and with results that the artist can only partly control.
From the cycle of Subtle Bodies (2006), texts written in ink, to the blue series of Untitled works (2009), in which the artist made use of plaster and powders, and then to the Red works of 2011, where she carried out experiments with various organic materials, the artist’s encounter with the element of water—her immersion in the element of water—has continued to develop and grow ever more fertile. Her work aspires to couple the scientific observation of the behavior of materials and the capacity to reproduce them with a state of creative freedom in which the image is shifted onto planes of perception quite different from those to which traditional painting has accustomed us. Her praxis finds it’s basis in the fragility of vision and it’s transformation.
The new work now realized for the Maramotti Collection is entitled 9’/ Unlimited and presents further developments. In addition to accepting the challenge of polaroid photography and large-scale images taken with a Large Format View Camera in the course of a true and proper performative process that devolves on a spirit of alchemy and its potential photographic registration, the artist has also created an environment, a space that becomes a vessel which the visitor is invited to enter.
But it is also a kind of cocoon in which strands of images in movement unravel themselves along the walls of the room, moving off towards “the uncontainable,” and leading the viewer into other possible territories.
One finds oneself afloat in a firmament of pigments and empty spaces that combine through sudden accelerations and de-accelerations into different formal configurations, with images repeatedly “falling and rising” in a sidereal silence in which form becomes the vehicle of the music inherent in the universe.
The exhibition is accompanied by the artist’s book that captures the flow of images (polaroids and video stills) in dialog with three incisive interventions: a haiku by the Japanese poet Momoko Kuroda, a musical score by the Roman composer Lucio Gregoretti, and a mysteric chemical formula devised by Andrea Lerwill, a British engineer whose specialization lies in the sciences of conservation. These collaborations constitute true and proper linguistic interweavings in which poetry, music, chemistry and the visual arts reciprocally amplify the mystery of an act of exploration and contemplation
