Saturday, December 3, 2022 LABS Contemporary Art is pleased to present Fino a tardi, collective's exhibition SenzaBagno, curated by Saverio Verini. For the first time, the works of the members of the collective - Francesco Alberico, Simone Camerlengo, Lucia Cantò, Matteo Fato, Lorenzo Kamerlengo, Gioele Pomante, Gianluca Ragni, Letizia Scarpello, Eliano Serafini - are brought together in a single exhibition environment, showing affinities and differences, but above all staging the dynamics that "regulate" the construction of a collective exhibition, between agreements and conflicts.

 

Fino a tardi it is therefore a project that reflects on an attitude, rather than on a theme. The title calls into question the spirit from which the exhibition took shape: in taking possession of the spaces of the gallery, the artists have stayed in the exhibition space putting in place a battle of pillows, the results of which are visible; a ritual through which to regulate the tensions that this shared path inevitably brought with it, an eccentric way to confront each other, not without playful implications.

 

The exhibition, in addition to offering an essay of the individual research of the members of SenzaBagno (lit. with no bathroom), is characterized as a shared project between the artists, the curator and the gallery, which has immediately supported the chorus and the exuberance of the proposal.

 

The works of the nine invited artists present points of contact, similarities, common interests, as well as different distances and formal approaches. The comparison between nature and artifice is a distinctive feature of the work of Eliano Serafini: Serafini exposes a deer jaw that, emphasizing its elongated shape, becomes an instrument for writing, like a kind of primordial pen. The work, therefore, presents a dual statute, organic and artificial, highlighting the ambivalence and symbolic power of traces that belong to the natural context and the potential that can derive from the encounter and grafts with industrial elements.

 

The research of Simone Camerlengo and Gianluca Ragni focuses on painting. In Camerlengo’s painting, the crossword puzzle, an element particularly rooted in the collective imagination, becomes a pretext for an exploration of the pictorial grammar, including hints of geometric abstraction, suggested by the grid of crosswords, and a rough figuration. Ragni’s approach, on the other hand, is oriented towards a painting almost in the gaseous state, from which springs an evanescent yet incisive form, a kind of "idol" that takes shape also thanks to the unusual height at which the painting is set up.

 

Also the work of Matteo Fato has obvious points of contact with the painting: a baseball bat turned by hand is exposed stained by accumulations of oil color. The mace returns as the subject/object of the chalcographic incision set up next to it, in an indivisible composition. The engraving is shown here by the artist as a bridge, a stroke of thought out of sight, towards the painting itself. An intimate gesture, born from a video made by the artist a few years before, and that here is revealed through the rediscovery of its ruins.

 

Lucia Cantò proposes three photographs, close-up details of hands - all belonging to her loved ones - on which are written short sentences taken from the collection of love poetry by Anne Sexton. In line with his interest for the written word, the triptych holds together viscerality and tenderness: the skin is grooved by the ink in an incisive but temporary way, an ephemeral tattoo of which Cantò offers, through the shots, a crystallization.

 

The work of Lorenzo Kamerlengo can be considered as a kind of monument to automatic drawing, to the sketch made quickly, almost thoughtfully. Parts of these "drawings" are shown on concrete modules, thus acquiring a body and a three-dimensionality that does not belong to them. Incomplete shapes, fragments, deconstructed features are thus fixed on an unusual support, thus making indelible these visual notes, usually intended for sketches on paper.

 

Letizia Scarpello is also interested in crossing and interpenetration between different media. Cylinders in foam rubber, a material of industrial origin, are shaped by the artist, thus assuming almost anthropomorphic connotations. The pieces of foam rubber, "posed" by Scarpello, are then photographed and then printed on emulsified canvases, which - thanks to the color and the format - contribute to make these images ambiguous; a process that, blending sculpture and photography, manifests the multiple directions of the artist and his poetics.

 

Gioele Pomante questions the relationship between the human being and the space-time coordinates, creating a short circuit between scales and antipodes formats. Five postcards are presented in the exhibition: a paradoxical attempt to "embrace" the entire planet Earth and look elsewhere; a look at the whole world that, through the use of an obsolete object and small format like the postcard, is reduced to a kind of souvenir.

 

The written word returns in the works of Francesco Alberico, the only artist who worked at a distance, delegating to the others of SenzaBagno the realization of the intervention. His work appears in several points of the gallery, a faint trace that emerges from the walls: the inscription "decision", crossed out, appears as a comment to the exhibition, underlining some of the themes that characterized the genesis and development of Fino a tardi: the conflict - inner and collective , precariousness, contradiction.