Wunderkammer | Luigi Ballario: Impressions
Riccardo Crespi gallery is proposing Wunderkammer again, transformed in its second year into a project of participatory culture: a space in the gallery is being offered to new patrons who desire to present and promote the work of young Italian artists.
Each collector selects an artist and undertakes to support the project, perhaps through the involvement of a curator, chosen by the ‘patron’ himself. This provides a guarantee of the credibility of the entire process through the establishment of relations between collectors and curators in the setting of the gallery.
The intention of the project is to offer a space to young Italian artists, producing one of their works and presenting it to the public, as well as favouring an exchange between collectors with a reputation for their knowledge of art and their attention to contemporary developments.
The collectors involved – in this season they will be Giorgio Fasol, Paolo Gori, Jean Claude Mosconi and Alberto Toffoletto – directly fund the production of the work or works for the Wunderkammer, which will subsequently be put up for sale through a silent auction.
The protagonist of the first show is the artist Luigi Ballario (1988), chosen by Paolo Gori, and the curator will be Federica Boràgina. Impressions presents Ballario’s original and poetic research, which is carried out through experimentation with the medium of photography and reveals the value and potential of an investigation of technique and the use of non-professional equipment. In fact the artist works with a hand-built view camera that becomes a magic box able to produce unusual and surprising images of the world, which he develops himself in the dark room. The fascinating technical rapport between positives and negatives is conveyed through a carefully measured and at the same time highly evocative aesthetic. The works on display show how the technical device can be a source of semantics: the view camera requires long exposure times that oblige the artist, who is the subject of many of his own pictures, to make a genuine physical effort, almost in a dimension of performance. The presences that inhabit Ballario’s works are the result of the heroic exercise of looking at the world with the whole of the body and not just with the eyes.
The project will be documented with a book published by Gli Ori and edited by Federica Boràgina.
In the gallery it will also be possible to visit Painting Now, a joint exhibition that presents a brief exploration of contemporary painting with works by Giulia Andreani, Romain Bernini, Eun Mo Chung, Nathalie du Pasquier, Cristiano Menchini, Roee Rosen, Marta Sforni, Caterina Silva, Veronica Smirnoff, Sinta Tantra and Gal Weinstein.
