Antonio Della Guardia, Giuseppe De Mattia, Stefano Serretta,

with a reading by Michela Lagalla

Vasco Forconi Commissariat

Opening : Thursday the 28th of July, 7pm

Port Tonic Art Centre is pleased to present “A Deeper Splash”, an exhibition of new productions conceived and created during the July 2022 residency.

For two weeks, the residency transformed into an “after-work” gathering for the artists, who were invited to combine their individual research and practices with an attentive approach to the spirit of the place and the intuitions sparked by its visual and cultural specificities. The apparent disengagement and languor of diving, of summer and aquatic imagery, thus became an opportunity to reflect on slowness as a means of escaping reality, on the symbolism of competition, and also on the structural conditions of the artist’s profession.

Antonio Della Guardia developed a series of large-scale drawings on fabric inspired by observations of marine, lunar, and solar landscapes, crystallized in a vocabulary of enigmatic hand gestures. The works, accompanied by a series of instructions characterized by a meditative, dreamy, and poetic tone, become instruments designed to stimulate the latent processes of the eye and the imagination.

Giuseppe De Mattia develops an ironic exploration of the mechanisms of production, sale, and consumption of artworks. Drawing inspiration from street market iconography, as well as from kitsch holiday imagery, the artist presents a partly autobiographical installation: a handkerchief bearing initials becomes a traveler’s bundle and, simultaneously, the stage for a choreography of commerce. The installation is complemented by the first iteration of a new series of paintings that conceive of conversation as an intimate and spontaneous form of entry into a specific community, and by a series of watercolor drawings, titled Buyers’ Attitude, which analyzes the various gestures of purchasing in art as well as in the marketplace.

Stefano Serretta stages a system of gazes and facial expressions alternately frozen in grimaces of joy, fear, and astonishment. This work, clearly inspired by cinema, creates a space in which some of the visual symbols of competitiveness and evaluation are deconstructed, giving rise to a silent narrative on the phenomenology of emotions in contemporary society.

Michela Lagalla engages in a dialogue with a short piece written by the Chilean writer and columnist Pedro Lemebel in 2005. The text is rooted in contemporary Latin American thought, grounded in the conception of discourse as a space of tension. Here, the written Spanish language is contrasted with the symbolic tradition of indigenous cultures, muted by the order of grammar and thus relegated to the margins. The oceanic symbolism that permeates Lemebel’s text inspired Lagalla to translate it into various languages ​​and to offer a spoken interpretation at the exhibition’s opening.