Prima che la notte cada

Renata Fabbri is delighted to announce Before Night Falls, Sophie Ko’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. The project presents a series of new Temporal Geographies, sculptures and photographic works which deal with time in its relation to material – caducity and forces of resistance – themes that have always been central to the artist’s work and research.

Produced with layers of pigments and ashes housed inside large geometrical frames, Sophie Ko’s Temporal Geographies come across as drawings of time settled in a place, spatial images of the dialectical relationship that we entertain with time. In this series of works, the deployment of the force of gravity is fundamental, as through imperceptible collapses and shifts in the material, constantly alters the composition of the painting, marking the relentless passing of time on the surface. Just as an hourglass slowly empties while accumulating sand at the bottom, likewise Temporal Geographies transfigure the irreversibility of time and, simultaneously, the “taking shape” of existence in its own flow.

In this new exhibition, fragments of a celestial body punctuate the gallery spaces, inviting the observer to imagine the reconstruction of its entirety. Perhaps they are the remains of a stellar explosion, or maybe we are faced with the birth of a star: the end of its life cycle and at the same time its genesis. Belonging to the series Temporal Geographies, these irregular splinters seem to reach out towards each other to be joined together once again – or maybe this is the first time.

In certain points around of the gallery, on the floor, we come across a number of bronze sculptures obtained by pairing leaves with pieces of bark, transforming the former into sails and the latter into hulls. These simple boats are the result of an ordinary and timeless gesture: like a child’s game, but in which we acknowledge the basic sense of human art-making: the ability to discover the world by transforming it, giving spiritual form to material.

The exhibition path ends with the representation of two hands –  those of an adult and a child – lying on the surface of a scanner. The image evokes the sense of childish wonder before the discovery of a beam of light, which as it slides briefly over things, mimetically captures and reproduces reality, only to then be plunged once more into darkness, like a falling star that that rapidly disappears in front of our eyes. Before Night Falls is an invitation to look with childlike wonder at that sparkle before everything around us becomes dull once again; it’s an attempt to re-orient the gaze toward time, thinking of it not only as running out of the exhaustion of time, but as the growth of life resisting the destructive forces of time. Thus this passage from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke may be perceived as the text underpinning Sophie Ko’s exhibition:

«We pass away like this and it seems to me that people are all distracted and preoccupied and don’t pay proper attention as we go along. It’s as if a shooting star were to fall and no one saw it and no one made a wish.»

An essay by Riccardo Venturi accompanies the exhibition.