Davide D’Elia: Fresco

The exhibition is devised to interface with the museum’s collection and the specific museographical criteria that govern the exhibition path, leading around the seventeenth-century palazzo in which it is located. The exhibition consists of eight Plexiglas paintings from the “Fresco” cycle, created during a previous site-specific intervention.

Davide D’Elia has investigated the relationship between past and present, art history and contemporary art, academic painting and the pictorial ‘gesture’, in a process that focuses on a rethinking of form and colour in a contemporary key. In order to create the “Fresco” cycle, the artist did not work directly on the frescoes themselves but attached specially designed Plexiglas structures to them. This allows him to apply backgrounds of ‘iris blue’ paint, sometimes concealing the organic elements of the landscape, sometimes the architecture, in order to bring out the construction of the painting process underlying the frescoes. Once removed from the frescoes, the eight paintings became abstract paintings – or ‘absolute’ paintings, as the artist defines them – on which the trace of the compositional investigation was preserved, creating a discourse between ‘absent’ and ‘present’ painting.

The exhibition in Bologna is completed by two new site-specific interventions, “Zero” and “Zero1“.