Beatrice Pediconi. Presenze

Beatrice Pediconi is a multimedia artist who recasts traditional languages to explore alternative processes to reach novel formal and expressive solutions impossible to completely control. The exhibition Presenze/Presences at the Gipsoteca of the Galleria Nazionale stems from a series of drawings on paper made with an unconventional technique that employs strips of photographic emulsion removed from previous works.

These are subtle, nearly evanescent signs resulting from a complex process. In a tank full of water, using brushes or directly with her own hands, the artist moves Polaroid emulsion as a thin veil of silk to be arranged onto watercolor paper. Water becomes the element that allows the transformation of photographic material into a tool for drawing, giving rise to an experimental technique in-between different media.

The resulting images become relics of a past that has been transformed and convey an intimate account of old memories revealing all of their fragility. With this process, only apparently simple yet requiring sophisticated steps, the artist takes us on a journey of memories where the final works represents an attempt to make sense of our present by infusing new life into fragments from the past.

"The Nude series, part of the exhibition, is the result of a research that I developed after my father’s demise and is a reflection on the passage of time and loss to question our ability to process memories. These drawings are the result of a migration and their volatile and minimal traces bear witness to a story. The series Nude is about leaving marks that serve as evidence of our existence” (Beatrice Pediconi).

Placing the exhibition Presenze/Presences in the Gipsoteca of the Galleria Nazionale, populated by vibrant “presences” such as faces, bodies and stories that are offered to the visitor, might be at first unsettling - so much material with so little signs – but, on the other hand, looking at it from a different perspective, it is perhaps in every respect the place where silent correspondences can be created, where imaginary, and maybe imaginative, dialogues can be intertwined.