BUILDING presents, from November 8th, 2023 to 27th January, 2024, the group exhibition Glitch, an exhibition project curated by Chiara Bertola and Davide Ferri, which features a selection of twenty-four paintings by ten Italian and international artists from different generations: Simon Callery, Angela de la Cruz, Peggy Franck, Pinot Gallizio, Mary Heilmann, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Andrea Kvas, Maria Morganti, Farid Rahimi, Alejandra Seeber.

In the regular and even fabric of reality, stretch marks can sometimes appear, superficial tears that reveal the presence of another dimension. The saturated fullness of life suddenly breaks down, giving way for vents from which signals of “an energy of existence” seep in, as the philosopher François Jullien stated.

Something similar occurs in painting, when the precise correspondence between image and medium fails, or when the pure materiality of painting overflows, hinting at an unprecedented vitality. All of a sudden, this disjointedness gives rise to something that presents itself to the viewer with no warning; something that, although it might potentially go unnoticed, opens a chink, a breach that reveals another view and another nuance of thought. Therefore, the focus is aimed at a kind of painting whose truth does not lie in representationand its organicity, but rather in an the idea of the a painted image that negotiates with different media and formats, embracing its presence and material ramifications.

The exhibition, which includes both figurative and abstract works, refers to an idea of “mere painting” that plays with the idea of “real painting”, or the idea of truth in painting, which has always had a place in reflections about the medium.

The resulting suggestions may sink their roots in some pictorial research of the second half of the twentieth century, in particular the ones of) exponents of the 1960s current of post-painterly abstraction, and currents of the seventies (such us Radical Painting, Pittura Pittura and Support Surfaces), which reflected a widespread desire for objectivity, and the consequent disappearance of subjectivity (that is, the artist‘s disappearance to make way for the viewer), and reflections on the genre, regarding its key elements (format, size, medium, color – “color that does not embellish”, as Maria Morganti says), whose outcome is a painterly object that rejects any kind of narrative, representation or illusion character, and asserts its presence without signifying anything other than itself.

The exhibition shows painting in its pure essentiality, together with a fecund crack, a shift, caused by subverting our habitual, conventional and, way of seeing. This produces a gap that generates a sort of energetic vitality at a primordial level, in terms of the everyday – in the sense of the pace and daily traces of time – and craftsmanship – the pleasure of making things by hand.

If convention has never taken artistic practice very far, then seeking some kind of stumbling block in representation is a necessary condition for pushing art towards a dimension of vitality. A stretch mark in the saturated, compact system of what is known and predictable, can therefore turn out to be a fertile space of freedom, in which life can flow, roam, complete and renew itself.

Works as a background, or as a landscape of the spectator, where the viewer enters inside a set and where the work becomes a place to accommodate the things that may happen there. The works of Alejandra Seeber (Buenos Aires, 1969), for example, bring forth an unstable vision that can never be defined as univocal, staining her canvases to give the image another opportunity to react, lose its bearings and multiply.

More information: https://building-gallery.com/en/exhibitions/glitch/