The new exhibitions organised at Studio La Città in Verona are masterly and razor-sharp. They are open to local districts that, from different angles, explore the imaginative memorability of painting, drawing, escape routes or even social fabrics with subtle ideological undertones – as is the case with the exhibition in the gallery’s East Cathedral, where we find the work of Victoria Stoian (the title of the exhibition, realised in collaboration with Peola Simondi from Turin, is CodNis).
In the spaces of the West Cathedral, the discourse tackled by Luigi Carboni in his new cycle of works, created from 2019 onwards, takes us into the sphere of an entirely new research, whose inner essence aims to create relationships of participation and interpenetration between abstract and iconic planes, now heroically inclined, now erotically entangled. “In my works I elaborate a narrative through the present questioning of what really separates or unites abstract and figurative painting,” states the artist in a note on Ridisegnare (Redesigning) which opens the catalogue (published by Arti grafiche della Torre) of this compelling journey called Come code di lucertole / Which flutter like lizard tails linked to myokinetic power, the Leonardesque thinking hand, the transparency of drawing, the esquisser and the magnetic power of the griffonner.
After Carboni’s chromatically resonating and pulsating entanglements, it is Antonio Marchetti Lamera’s turn to direct his narrative towards umbratility, the smell (dull colour) of time, pushed beyond the edges and transformed into silent and light shadows, spread or even smeared on surfaces to give life (body) to the transparency of years, months, days and hours.
Part of a broader cycle dedicated to specific reflections, which are entrusted to the volume Prima e dopo lo zenit (Before and After the Zenith, Vanilla Edizioni, 2023), Marchetti Lamera’s new solo exhibition (his second) at La Città focuses on time, understood as matter, as the perspective of a moment that from the singular turns towards the plural, from the human (artistic) to the cosmic (conceptual). Curated by Matteo Galbiati, who finds in the artist’s work “what is not overlooked by the eye”, the shadow precisely, “a foothold to determine not things, but their succession in time”. Marchetti Lamera dedicates this particular scenario to Eclissi e riflessi.
La rivoluzione di Aristarco (Eclipses and Reflections. The revolution of Aristarchus), a journey that methodologically crosses different disciplines and transforms the space into a temporal memento – the works in the exhibition include at least two polyptychs (Cronos and Gea of 2022) and a large circular work (Elio, 2022) – tending to slip into the brilliance of design and an irresistible past, in a Greek sky linked to the astronomy of Aristarchus, father of the treatise On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon. Three small and iridescent Shadows on the city of Amsterdam (2022) show us, on a wall, the constant force of change (determined by the use of iridescent, lacquer-like colour glazes) under the effect of light and allow us to see the interval between the moment when the door opens and the moment when the artist begins to reappropriate the void.
Luigi Carboni, Come code di lucertole, Victoria Stoian, CodNis; Antonio Marchetti Lamera, Eclissi e riflessi. La rivoluzione di Aristarco, 28.01 – 18.03. 2023
images: (cover 1) Antonio Marchetti Lamera, «Eclissi e Riflessi», 2023, exhibition view, Studio La Città, Verona (2) Luigi Carboni, «Come code di lucertole», 2023, exhibition view, Studio La Città, Verona (3) Victoria Stoian, «CodNis», 2023, exhibition view, Studio La Città, Verona
