Fuori Porta

Villa Pacchiani in Santa Croce sull'Arno is pleased to present the group show “Fuori porta”, a venture by the City of Santa Croce sull'Arno, curated by Ilaria Mariotti with Caterina Fondelli and Alessandra Ioalè. The exhibition is produced thanks to the support of Crédit Agricole Italia. Fuori porta is an Italian term for anything that lies outside the city gates and evokes trips to the countryside or otherwise outside the residential area, and what the term expresses overlaps with the concept of the suburbs, intended as a marginal zone of a territory and, more specifically, with respect to an urban agglomeration. Santa Croce sull'Arno is a small manufacturing center characterized by strong industrialization that has, over time, designed urban planning, updated the social structure, and revised the relationship between the built-up area and its green and naturalistic surroundings, hills and forests. “Fuori porta” is an exhibition involving eight artists: Oliviero Fiorenzi, Beatrice Gelmetti, Nicola Ghirardelli, Matteo Nuti, Francesco Pacelli, Phillippa Peckham, Fabrizio Prevedello, and Caterina Sbrana. Their researches decline in different ways the concepts of landscape and the perspectives to observe and explore it, for each a different one. Landscapes geographically close to the one to which Santa Croce sull'Arno refers to, but sometimes also far away. Those are researches that stem from a naturalistic datum, in order to transport it into an inner and existential dimension. Oliviero Fiorenzi, Beatrice Gelmetti, Nicola Ghiradelli and Francesco Pacelli represent an experience that takes place just a few kilometers away from Santa Croce sull'Arno. Caterina Fondelli conceived the project C.F. Contemporary Fire as a contemporary art program, including exhibitions and artist residencies, founded about a year ago and, not surprisingly, located in her own family house in the town of Cerreto Guidi (Florence). The power of a place, its features, its landscape and the community that inhabits it: these are the central points of this program. Immersed in a large garden, peculiar for its extension, but especially for its richness in visual diversity, the context of this independent space becomes the protagonist, revealing a silent and also essential strength. This environment actually turns out to be capable of permeating the researches and identities of those who have dedicated moments of observation to it, and who have discovered there, inputs for an immersive meditation on their own works and on the continuation of the investigations conducted so far. Caterina Fondelli proposes a selection of four artists whose research, following the residencies, shows that they carry in them the echo of that period of stay in that very peculiar space. In proposing this selection within Villa Pacchiani, is clear the intention to carry out an action of trespassing between different contexts. Transporting the suggestions and internalizations that took place in a rural setting, outdoors and deeply marked by the presence of the elements, into an institutional exhibition venue, with its own program, marked by a close and long-lasting bond with territory. The research of Oliviero Fiorenzi (Osimo, 1992, lives and works between Osimo and Milan) focuses on the unpredictability of spaces. He experiments with the artwork as a game, a construction of experience and an inscription of meaning. The artist presents a series through which he has experimented with techniques for making kites, conceived as subjects and states of mind, and documenting their flight. Each kite corresponds to a landscape, a sky. In Beatrice Gelmetti’s paintings (Verona, 1991, lives and works in Mestre) the elements of the different perspective planes - one related to a landscape view, the other to an abstract reality - dialogue to build narratives about places near and far, real or imaginary. In her landscape, trees, large brushstrokes and gestures arise from the same ground, and the scraping of her arms and the sedimentations of color castings in water or oil are subjects of an almost contemplative study. Francesco Pacelli (Perugia, 1988, lives and works in Milan) presents in the exhibition a corpus of sculptures that are concrete and magical at the same time, manifesting the artist's research on the relationship of parallelism and interconnection between nature and artifice and between magic and technique. Pacelli relates the rationalist approach to the sphere of the unattainable, of what can be intuited through one's personal and relativistic subjectivity, but cannot be demonstrated according to scientific method. In the sculptures by Nicola Ghirardelli (Como, 1994. Lives and works in between Milan and Tuscany) artifacts and natural objects become matrices for reorganizing already existing images and forms. The reconfiguration, which is the result of metamorphosis and recomposition, occurs through fusion and reconnection, and the result is constantly in the liminal area between chaotic excess and harmonious order, between violence and new balance. Matteo Nuti (1979, Bientina, where he lives and works) brings back to the center of his pictorial research the three-dimensional experience of the body of the painting by conceiving it as the landscape-environment of the painting subject on the surface. Nuti goes so far as to compromise its usual fruition in order to stimulate, instead, a new plastic experience through the experimentation of different liguistic-visual modalities that deconstruct the stereotypical landscape genre, while at the same time enriching and revitalizing its tradition. In the body of works by Phillippa Peckham (Iserlohn 1957. Lives and works in Fosdinovo) in this exhibition (xylography and monotypes), the typically English garden, seemingly haphazard and random but weighed in the alternation of blooms and the coexistence of local and more exotic plants, surrounding her home and studio in the hills near Sarzana, the neighboring fields take shape as priority subjects explored through the practice of walking and observing. Caterina Sbrana's research is an investigation poised between primordial materials, traditional techniques, and a contemporary vision contaminated by technology. The collection of materials, traces, residues, and textures, and the relationship with the landscape are at the center of her work, which makes use of different media: drawing, painting, and ceramics. Poppies become a tracing tool for large maps; soils, coals, and vegetables are the material for painting landscapes and inspired by digital visions. In parallel, in recent years she has also devoted herself to design and making art objects. Fabrizio Prevedello (Padua, 1972. Lives and works in Versilia) crosses the landscape by capturing graphic signs and natural phenomena. His sculptures, made with materials of both industrial production and natural origin, are a continuous evocation of places, mainly the mountains, traversed and inhabited by human beings. Brutalist cultural references regarding forms and materials, reference to great twentieth-century sculpture, a point of view that places us in a time and space, but also the continuous fascination with what happens to be found (slates, stones) also inform Prevedello's artwork in a hybrid and surprising accumulation of images and signs.