The Cinematic Eye: Visual Arts and the Cinema beyond the threshold of the Visible

The A arte Invernizzi gallery presents an exhibition entitled “The Cinematic Eye”, curated by the director and filmmaker Francesco Castellani.

Following a personal vision of the director, the exhibition investigates possible conceptual and expressive affinities between the visual arts and cinema by using specific elements of cinematographic languages as instruments of analysis and reading of the works, carrying out iconographic choices in the search for possible connections, profound and not merely formal relations between the diverse languages. The frame, the field and the out of field, the light and the optical-photographic dynamics, the plane sequence, the flashback and ellipse editing are habitual “technical tools” of the director’s work which are brought into play in order to project and substantiate a “system of vision” of the exhibited works.

As Francesco Castellani writes in the exhibition catalogue: “The works by Nicola Carrino, Enrico Castellani, Alan Charlton, Carlo Ciussi, Gianni Colombo, Dadamaino, Riccardo De Marchi, Lesley Foxcroft, François Morellet, Mario Nigro, Pino Pinelli, Niele Toroni and Michel Verjux give body to the structure of this attempt at narrating connections, relations and consonances between languages. An attempt that in my approach began by instinctively thinking of the concept of ‘dark matter’.” (…)
“When I reflect upon the artists gathered together here in this project and about their possible relations with the cinema I can only imagine them as being experimenters who with means that differ from laboratory instruments also look for ‘dark matter’. In other words, they try with their artistic actions to give a visible form to what moves beyond the threshold of the visible, beyond conventional time and space, outside and inside ourselves, in the vastness of the Universe as also within the complex labyrinth of the interior world. A research that they share with the most courageous directors”.

The works are proposed in a “system of vision”, articulated on the two floors of the gallery in three “planes sequence” (a linguistic element par excellence of cinematographic technique): here the intention is to offer these as part of a coherent and fluid “continuum”, each in its singularity, just as in the cinema the plane sequence identifies a dynamic of narrative continuity that is not interrupted by editing cuts.
In the room of the upper floor the three-dimensional field/space of the intervention/sculpture by Nicola Carrino and the works by Enrico Castellani, Gianni Colombo, Dadamaino, Riccardo De Marchi and François Morellet show how the painting/field, physical limit of the material support of pictorial action, are the shared “limit/space”, the common threshold to overcome towards the representation of the “out of field” of what is “beyond” the threshold of the “visible”.
In the next room the work by Niele Toroni takes on form in arranging itself on the walls as a “cinematographic sequence” with its modular development of the brush marks in progression from one to six.
The work by Michel Verjux presents itself as a montage connection which ideally unites the sequences of the upper floor to those of the lower floor in a continuity of the system of vision.
On the lower floor the analytical use of constitutive elements of the image/cinema investigates the possible affinities between the languages and works of Alan Charlton, Carlo Ciussi, Lesley Foxcroft, Mario Nigro and Pino Pinelli which are read here – on the basis of the Deleuzian conception – as “images/time” and “images/movement”, visible forms of the “invisible”, chromatic, plastic, kinetic and cinematographic elaborations of a universe without calm (in perennial “movement”) in which the individual is part of both “time” and “nature”, precarious tangle of atoms in search for a sense in the “Lebenswelt”, that “vital world” which envelopes everything and that comprises within an organic and universal “unicum”.

On the occasion of the exhibition a bilingual catalogue will be published containing the reproduction of the works on exhibit, an introductory essay by Francesco Castellani, a poem by Carlo Invernizzi and biographical notes of the artists.