Giovanni De Cataldo | Spina: Curated by Daniela Bigi and Gianna Di Piazza

SPINA, a double solo show dedicated to Giovanni de Cataldo and Gianfranco Maranto, curated by Daniela Bigi and Gianna Di Piazza. Tenth appointment of Visual Startup, the artistic direction program of Palazzo Ziino that the Municipality of Palermo has entrusted since 2016 to the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo, the exhibition is part of an overall research design focused on the poetics and expressive worlds of the generation of artists emerged in recent seasons. Among the various formulas described in recent years by Visual Startup to make it possible to freely unfold ideas, the modality of the double staff chosen on this occasion to offer a close, intimate dialogue we could almost say, between different projects than by certificate. The logistical peculiarity of the display container represented the cornerstone on which the two artists set the mechanism of the exhibition, both interested in reading the space of the work but at the same time forcing it, within a mobility of the relationships between the elements that allows make the points of view, the multiplications, the hybrids unstable and consequently deepen them. A way of proceeding which, despite the geometrization of most of the forms that each of the two authors proposes, actually speaks to us of an intolerance, not grilled but authentic, for the perpetration of unilateral visions, for the proliferation of a certain perceptive subjection, it tells us of a desire to look more acute, more personal and, why not, with a renewed charm.

The transformation of spaces, the disorientation of certain objects or materials, the underlining or repetition of some elements, the bright coloring of the rooms are all strategies for soliciting eyes, epidermis, gestures often so automated, so anesthetized, that they become extraneous to our own bodies, to our will. The small sgrammatic, certain reiterations, or forcing, some provocation, some slight detournements, without ever becoming too explicit, playing on the contrary on a ridge of subtle ambiguity, reveal the curiosity of both for the physical, sentimental, daily experience of their habitat , which becomes a privileged angle from which to look at the more complex structure of reality.