DISPLAY presents Camera con vista, solo exhibition by Bislacchi (Matteo Santacroce) featuring works created during VIR - Viafarini-in-residence program in Milano.
Bislacchi: Camera con vista (A room with a view)
Curated by Ilaria Monti
11 December, 2021 – 29 January, 2022
(by appointment only)
DISPLAY, Parma
DISPLAY presents Camera con vista, solo exhibition by Bislacchi (Matteo Santacroce) featuring works created during VIR - Viafarini-in-residence program in Milano.
The works exhibited are part of the ongoing series Wall of Canvas, aimed to explore physical and formal potential of painting through a very personal approach to painting itself. The artist brings the act of painting back to its essential parts: canvas, stretcher bars and color. Canvas is converted from pictorial supports into structural element, and together with the stretcher bars it gives to the painting architectural features. The vertical and horizontal arrangement of the canvases echo the dispositions of bricks in the building techniques, giving shape to an actual real painted wall. Painting turns into constructing gesture and the works, strongly related to the space, tend towards a hybridization between functionality and wall decoration.
Camera con vista draws inspiration from a short round trip between London, where Bislacchi lives and works, Milano and Parma, and then becomes a storage of visions, visual citations, and possibilities.
A room with a view is a non-place, as Zygmunt Bauman named all hotel rooms: places of transit which belong to us only for the time we require, with their windows overlooking the city we are visiting. Facade’s Colors of Parma Duomo and Correggio's paintings mark the artist's memories of his trip to Parma. Thus, the works Duomo and Di Correggio mi ricordo un muro, created for the exhibition at DISPLAY, are the result of a process based on synthesis and abstraction of images and visions. By intertwining painted canvases with stretchers, the artist creates a combination of voids and surfaces interacting with space and time:
It was Parma, it was the Duomo, it was Correggio and a few months ago it was a cleared room, and now all that remains is like weaved into the edges of this frame.
Once installed into DISPLAY, also the works turn into rooms with a view. They may be intended as a sort of hypertext – or as open doors, open windows – with a profound connection to the city of Parma, to an interior and external space, to masterpieces of figurative painting and to the experiences of European and American Informal Art.
Bislacchi (b.1995, Italy) is a London-based visual artist. His practice investigates the boundaries between painting and space starting from the canvas, which is dismantled from its established function as a support and rather conceived as a constructional element of painting. Recent group shows include, among others: “Yellow Archangel Perceiving Anomalies”, General Practice, Lincoln (2021); “After Hours”, Bowes-Parris Gallery, London (2020). He was shortlisted for the “Art Rights Prize” (2020); “Young Talent Contemporary Purchase Prize” (2019) and the “Signature Art Prize” (2018) and awarded "The Chadwyck-Healey Prize for Painting" (2018).
