Fioritura

Renata Fabbri is glad to announce Fioritura, Serena Vestrucci’s (Milan, 1986) first solo show at the gallery. The exhibition, which inaugurates the recent collaboration between the artist and the gallery, links two new works – a family of sculptures and a series of drawings – conceived in dialogue with the exhibition spaces that welcome them.

Delving into the interstice of everyday experience and taking inspiration from unexpected encounters with common objects, Serena Vestrucci’s research questions and manipulates the ordinary through the use of multiple artistic processes and linguistic paradoxes. Drawn to objects, images, materials, concepts and situations belonging to everyday life, the artist makes them the main subject and material of the artistic experience. Modified and translated into fields of actions different from their original ones, Vestrucci focuses on the latter, changing their perception and filling them with new meanings through instantaneous and illusory poetics, slightly visible and apparently simple.

On the occasion of her solo show in the spaces of Renata Fabbri’s gallery, the artist gives life to a work in which the obviousness of everyday life meets the complexity of human existence through allusive, and typically, playful bewilderment. On display, in the main halls, twelve Teste di cavolo [Cabbage Heads] silently lie on the floor. These are bronze sculptures which have been cast in scale 1:1 from a family of cabbages (red cabbage, white cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, savoy cabbage, Brussels sprouts) and on whose surfaces human features can be seen. The works, secluded and solitary, present an imaginary catalogue of small figures offended, insulted, mocked, and therefore marginalized, moved away and rejected. The characters, dispersed and set aside in the bare rooms of the gallery, are each on their own; introverted and shy, they let vulnerable and anti-monumental portraits emerge. The redemption from this sense of isolation and solitude takes place on the lower floor, where a set of small spots reveals an image made possible thanks to their proximity and juxtaposition. Batter d’occhio [Eye-blink] is a choral drawing: a multitude of traces of human blinks, replicated and fixed by the artist on large sheets of paper hung on the walls. Here, Vestrucci conceives eyelashes as brushes that everyone has constantly at their disposal and which, in their incessant movement, leave uncontrolled marks that scratch the air. Their beat, instantaneous and elusive, refers to the rapid and transitory time that elapses between one glance and another, just like our presence: momentary and fleeting. A call to collectivity.

Vestrucci adopts the expression flowering to describe the dialogue between the two works which, placed on different floors, are destined never to meet each other. Specifically, before the cabbage heads flower, they contain the greatest number of vitamins, trace elements and other useful substances. Once they flower, they lose most of their nutritional value: the plant begins to spend its energies in the production of seeds, the stems lose moisture, become hard and fibrous, and the leaves become bitter. Last but not least: flowering is the technical term used in scientific literature to indicate, in the field of book restoration, a process of degradation and aging of the paper, which is manifested by the appearance, more or less extensive, of stains and dots. These pigmentations are generally small in size.

Simple and at the same time complex, the project conceived by Serena Vestrucci for the Renata Fabbri gallery is capable, like all her works, of creating rarefaction, silence and dialogue between the elements presented, between us and them, between ourselves. The works, with an ironic, but at the same time tragic and poetically violent character, seem to tiptoe around the most normal aspects of existence, placing us in front of situations that are as banal as they are intrinsically true. Starting from the title itself: apparently a reference to spontaneous life, immediate, almost taken for granted and expected. Yet this flowering turns out to be a sign of aging, decay, waste. It all seems immediate, but it is all hidden.