Really Intangible, a solo show by Alice Cattaneo, an artist with an international background, was born from the collaboration between Ikon gallery in Birmingham and a.topos, the independent space of the eponymous curatorial female quartet. Sculpture, installation and video. There are five works that Alice Cattaneo exhibits in Venice, in the intimate space outside the tourist routes of a.topos, a few steps from the doors of the Arsenale. An exhibition made of really intangible works, since they are fragile, made since 2015 to present times.

In each of them the reference to manual work and an almost childlike joy derived from building, from the freshness of spontaneous invention. The works are the result of an assembly: heterogeneous materials – ceramics, slate, metal – are held together by wires or adhesive tape; however, the real protagonist is the glass, not only blown, worked by the artist in the Murano furnaces, but also as objet trouvé, in the form of those thin vitreous paste canes collected in the laboratories of the island, where they are used to forge murrine.

Even the video on display is intentionally artisanal, with its many small silent fragments, rapid visions of a world made of everyday objects that are passed from hand to hand, manipulated, moved, as in a game – an assembly of micro narrations, brief domestic epiphanies.

To play an important role there are then the line, a subtle plot of things that in the works is repeated horizontally and vertically, never too obvious, and not least the space: like the pauses in a musical composition, it is for the works at the same time completion and support for the slender glass structures that are developed aerial in the room, skeletons of imaginary architecture that bring with them the memories of Russian Constructivism, which the artist loves and looks at.

The structures of the works, so delicate that they could be swept away by a careless gesture, are bare in their conjunctions and in their precarious bonds; the state of fragility and tension are manifest, and there is no deception. Only at a second glance the works of Alice Cattaneo reveal something more than their formal rigor, insinuating reminiscences from the animal and plant world; here then perhaps appear a pod, the suspended and translucent geometries of a spider web, a snail that crawls, on the ground.

Alice Cattaneo (Milan, 1976) formed between the Glasgow School of Art and the San Francisco Art Institute. She has exhibited in some of the most important institutions of Italian contemporary art (such as the Maxxi Museum, the Hangar Bicocca, Palazzo Grassi, the Madre Museum and the Museo del Novecento in Milan), and foreign (Today Art Museum in Beijing, 4th Guangzhu Biennial in South Korea, MLF Marie-Laure Fleisch Gallery, Brussels, Hubert Winter Gallery, Vienna, Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco).

Laura Guarnier

Info:

Alice Cattaneo. Really Intangible
Galleria a.topos
22 November – 22 December 2019
Opening hours: 10.00 – 18.00, closed on Monday
Castello 2432, Fondamenta dei Penini, 30122 Venezia