Andrea Santarlasci: Reflections from an Invisible Place

Galleria Passaggi presents Andrea Santarlasci’s solo exhibition Reflections from an Invisible Place, curated by Arabella Natalini.

The exhibition falls within Santarlasci’s multifaceted artistic research, often leading to the “discovery” and the “reminiscence” of places that are barely visible or little known and can evoke a symbolic dimension: “ … the place “suggests”, somehow even “begets” the artwork… in my opinion, to define aplace as such, and not just as an abstract and non-specific space, it must have or allude to a “meaning”, to an “image”. It must refer to something that evokes and at the same time takes us to an elsewhere, toward a dimension that is not of this place, that comes to us from another context, and yet, at the same time, it belongs to the place and is intimately preserved inside it. Very often what appears foreign to us, that very unfamiliar element, is what identifies a place in its specificity. Only at this point, I believe, it is possible to speak about that exact place and not another one. This is its most interesting aspect, the feature that makes us understand the profound specificity of a place…” (Andrea Santarlasci).
Since the end of the 1980s, Andrea Santarlasci has been developing a language where many and various techniques meet and intersect, such as painting, sculpture, photography, and installation. As a result, a close interaction of space, light, color, and sound is created.

Since his debut, the artist has been developing the themes and motifs characterizing his poetics: the relation between the natural and the artificial, private space and external environment, personal reflection and collective dimension, along with the visual suggestions connected to the concepts of doubleness and reflection, shadow and time – in a constant balance between the emotional and the conceptual dimension. All these themes are often
characterized by either a juxtaposition or a fusion between the material and the virtual.

The ongoing and deep meditation on the notions of place and public space – highlighted especially by the relation between man and his environment seen even in its most disquieting aspects – is a key element of the artists’ research. Each of his artwork has an enigmatic side that offers material for reflecting upon the condition of estrangement and amazement of the contemporary man, in his confrontation with reality whose borders are expanding, hardly recognizable, with its complex and contradictory aspects.
The works exhibited in Pisa stems from a larger project connected to an ancient place in the city, a specific site where the old river Auser (now called Serchio) merged into the Arno. Over time, the confluence of the two rivers along with their ramifications have changed the shape of the land, whose configuration appears today quite transformed. The original place, now disappeared, is evoked in the gallery exhibition space, where the artworks are connected via a sort of karstic thread tying together past and present through a reflection upon the flowing of time and the ways we perceive it.
Among the artworks exhibited: a large installation made with recycled wooden boards that appears like a fragment of architecture, a stair flooded by the waters of the river, “the threshold of an old dock precariously sliding down until it adheres to the floor”, a tree branch collected at the mouth of the Serchio and whose edge is transformed into a sculpture reminiscent of a little boat’s prow, flanked by a series of small pictures of fluvial landscapes and by a painting hinting at possible, old routes along the river. Finally, a light box diptych bearing a “fluid” writing – with the letters composing the word Auser barely highlighted – reenacts philosophical meditations on permanence and change, stimulating a reflection upon human existence.
This last work in particular refers to an earlier project envisaged by Santarlasci, a project where a luminescent writing had to be placed at the confluence of the two rivers, which is now between the urban space and the natural bank of the Arno. In the artist’s words “An intervention that invites us to reminisce a place that does not exist anymore and, by locating it in today’s landscape, envisages the encounter between two different and yet simultaneous moments in time, like in an heterochrony”.
For Santarlasci, then, “the water of the river becomes that substance allowing us to contemplate and imagine time. Liquid and dissolving, illusory and reflecting, the water is that element that can always be compared to the other elements…Water can dig into the mysterious depths of the earth, create, divert, and destroy underground paths able to leave traces of their old presence”.