On Saturday, December 14, at 6 pm, Galleria de' Foscherari will celebrate the opening of Michele Zaza's first solo exhibition in Bologna.
The site-specific video installation Segreto cosmico (Cosmic Secret, 2018) and the two historic installations Universo estraneo (Foreign Universe, 1976), made up of twenty-seven photos, and Cielo abitato (Inhabited Sky, 1985), with seven photos and twenty-one wooden sculptures, convey the artist's compelling visual investigation into the theme of cosmic space and the search for alterity.
Moving from the hypothesis of an alternate "universe," with bits of bread abstractly arranged on the wall to form a field of heavenly bodies and astronomical elements, we travel on through images of soap bubbles blown by father and son (in Universo estraneo), and the faces of the artist and his wife (in Cielo abitato). These, too, become celestial objects: the white and blue evoke the sky, while the poses suggest planetary rotation and orbit and the movement of the cosmos. In the end, we come to the more recent hypothesis of Segreto cosmico, where the cosmos is reimagined through the transformation and transfiguration of elements from life. It takes shape in the third dimension that a video portrait creates within a cuspid shape painted directly on the wall, accompanied by abstract signs made out of bread, which are no longer photographed but rather presented in tangible form.
The transition from work to work, from 1976 to 2018, only accentuates the play of light and shadow, and the composition of different elements (photography, sculpture, video, wall installation) takes on the sense of a movement through time. It is a constant, unresolved movement, like the life of the cosmos itself: a ritual of being and becoming.
This exhibition, conceived by Michele Zaza for Galleria de' Foscherari, forges a dialogue between different points in time that highlights questions central to the artist's career, philosophy and approach.
The exhibition takes its title from the recent video installation made for the gallery space, which expresses the symbiosis and osmosis between art and life, abstraction and experience, matter and spirit: a new, different universe of the mind and of the imagination. The male and female faces joined together in an all-enveloping dimension, the sculptural forms of wood, the moving hands in the video, and the recurrent motif of ultramarine blue together sketch out a cosmic landscape, an ethereal dreamworld.