The Ephesian Letters (Greek: ἐϕέσια γράμματα) were enigmatic formulas that in Ancient Greece were engraved on amulets to be worn, because they were believed to possess magical effects, perhaps connected to the Ephesia, nocturnal orgiastic festivals in honor of the goddess Artemis, celebrated in the month of Artemis in Ephesus. Abstract signs, therefore, but capable of evoking in this synthetic definition the explosion of a vitalistic but crystallized harmony, inaccessible, delicate, placed in an indefinable space-time.
Caterina Morigi, “Lettere Efesie”, installation view, Galleria Studio G7, Bologna, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and Galleria Studio G7
This is the atmosphere you breathe when entering Studio G7 in Bologna, where the first solo exhibition of Caterina Morigi (Ravenna, 1991) is underway, which keeps what its challenging and intriguing title promises. The artist, who the gallery has followed since her debut in the under 30 category, has recreated in the exhibition space, a conceptual white cube with a grey grit floor and a panelled ceiling, an engaging setting in which a few works positioned in strategic points immediately project us into the joyful timelessness of a classical dream engraved in marble. But it is not the imperishable crystalline rock associated with the noble art of sculpture, but grit, that particular mixture of crushed white cement mixed with colourings used in construction to imitate granite. This choice reflects one of the main souls of the artist’s research, that is, the investigation into the peculiarities of materials coming from the technological or construction field with a view to detecting, through mimesis processes, new hypotheses of hybridization between the natural and the artificial dimension.
Caterina Morigi, “Lettere Efesie”, installation view, Galleria Studio G7, Bologna, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and Galleria Studio G7
The exhibition is the first project of the gallery’s Arte Impresa format, implemented in collaboration with Aganippe Pavimenti S.r.l., an Abruzzo company founded in the early twentieth century as a small tile manufacturing factory, which since the nineties has been exclusively engaged in the production of terrazzo and cement flooring, combining new technologies with the professionalism of master craftsmen, who are entrusted with the manual execution of the decorations. The artist encountered this material on the occasion of his participation, last summer, in the Una boccata d’arte exhibition, a festival organized by the Elpis foundation in collaboration with Galleria Continua, which for four years has invited young artists to engage with some of the most evocative and unknown Italian villages through site-specific interventions. In San Ginesio (MC) Caterina Morigi had created a sort of altarpiece in grit inspired by the flamboyant-floral Gothic facade of the Collegiate Church of Santa Maria Assunta, in addition to disseminating four small interventions around the town, consisting of symbols similar to those of the main work, setting them in the walls of historic buildings, many of which are still unusable after the 2016 earthquake. In that case, the discreet propagation of symbolic details extrapolated from the specificities of the place and used as decorative-evocative patterns arose from the observation that the few artistic decorations still usable in the village were those located on the outside of the buildings, the interior of which is still closed to the public for safety reasons. The artist’s intervention, reversing the balance of power between inside-outside and marginal and foreground elements, metaphorically returned to collective memory a heritage of images at risk of oblivion.
Caterina Morigi, “Lettere Efesie”, installation view, Galleria Studio G7, Bologna, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and Galleria Studio G7
A similar fragmentary score, as well as the same execution technique, has been adopted in the exhibition underway in Bologna, where a series of new works in grit are located within the abstract space of the gallery like cornerstones of an imaginary speculative building suspended in an immobile time. The thematic fulcrum in this case is a reconnaissance of the archetypes of the feminine operated through a visual re-meditation of images taken from mythological traditions from different cultures and eras, mixed and recompacted by the artist in her own personal integrated female pantheon. Embedded in the sculptural objects designed by the artist we find: the goddess Nut, Egyptian deity of the night, an elegant dancer’s body arched to simulate the starry sky, the goddess Baubo, mysterious goddess who was able to arouse Ceres’ laughter in a moment of affliction by looking from her breasts and speaking from her vagina, here present in a series of bas-relief silhouettes identical in shape but different in material composition, freely derived from a Sicilian clay statuette. Then a snake coiled in a spiral inside a drop shape, seen by the artist portrayed in the small church of San Demetrio Corone, but also the breast of Fouquet’s Madonna lactans, proposed in six chromatic variations in some portions of flooring where it is interpreted as a versatile decorative module for architectural cladding. And again, the mouth of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn, the unicorn of Raphael’s lady, the egg and the shell of Piero della Francesca’s Brera Altarpiece, the tapered hand of Parmigianino’s Madonna with the long neck, the lightning of Giorgione’s Tempest, peacefully coexisting in a polyptych overlooking the sky and framed by trompe-l’oeil twisted columns. The harmonization of this plurality of iconographic sources is achieved by the homogeneity of the aesthetics adopted, perfectly coherent in its formal, chromatic and material aspects with the idea of a new secular cultic syncretism in which elements from high and low culture manage to coexist without tension.
Caterina Morigi, “Lettere Efesie”, installation view, Galleria Studio G7, Bologna, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and Galleria Studio G7
If on the one hand, in fact, the chromatic range adopted, the opacity of the surfaces despite the brilliance of the colours and the synthetic style of the drawing recall Roman frescoes or the draperies of the characters depicted in Renaissance tempera panels, on the other hand the recognisable presence of the grit, a compound widespread on a large scale especially in low-cost construction from a few decades ago, introduce a familiar and kitsch connotation, if one thinks of grit as a popular surrogate for marble. Each piece present in the exhibition is the result of a continuous osmosis between the work of Caterina Morigi, that of the industrial machines and that of the artisans who in the company take care of the most delicate phases of the processing. The starting point is a drawing by the artist translated by her into digital and fed into the production plant, from which it emerges broken down into chromatic sections obtained with water cutting then assembled in an artisanal manner by Morigi using a mixture of glue and pigmented stucco with a process similar to the execution of the Roman opus sectile. The incisions inside the shapes are made with a manual cutter and then filled with colored cements that enliven the surface, enriching it with tactile implications. In the tiles, however, the already colored liquid cement was poured into molds made according to the artist’s design, without further pictorial interventions, according to the traditional process used for these tiles, from which only the final polishing was removed.
Caterina Morigi, “Lettere Efesie” (“Dea Baubo” I and e IV), 2025, inlay and engraving, grit, 32 x 12 x 3, 26 x 100 x 3 cm, courtesy the artist and Galleria Studio G7
It is clear how the synergy between the different authors of the various stages of the creation of the works is decisive in defining their final appearance, to which the artist’s interest in the peculiarities of contemporary materials and production processes, his fascination for the artificial that pretends to be natural through a mimetic adulteration and the search for a sort of technical and material “sincerity” contribute with equal importance through which, despite the illusionisms put in place, each work bears the codes of the process through which it was created. What his poetics triggers with wise subtlety is, therefore, a compelling treasure hunt of signs, understood both as traces of the transformations undergone by the materials, and as products of the different repetition of forms born from the instinctive emergence in his creative imagination of suggestions coming from the history of art of every latitude and time.
Info:
Caterina Morigi. Lettere Efesie
06/02/2025-29/03/2025
text by Giuliana Benassi
Galleria Studio G7
Via Val D’Aposa 4A – Bologna
www.galleriastudiog7.it
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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