Until 14 March 2025, it will still be possible to visit “Evo oblïato”, an exhibition by Francesca Romana Cicia and Eirene at the project room of Spazio Iris in Spoltore (PE), a studio run by artist Maura Prosperi, director of the ‘NATURALE’ project, within which this exhibition is part of. Curated by Laura Catini, the exhibition is dedicated to Lucia Spadano, who passed away on the night of 22 February 2024. She was an art critic and co-founder, with Umberto Sala, of the magazine “Segno” in 1976.
Francesca Romana Cicia, “Like a shell in the woods”, 2024, (detail), crystalline and enamels on ceramic, variable dimensions. Ph. Francesca Pascarelli
The exhibition is characterised by an unconventional layout, which involves the space vertically and horizontally through the installation-based interventions of the two artists. It is no coincidence that this takes place within an exhibition context linked to the great theme of time. Time like a pearl necklace or a melody, the time of science and consciousness, to use the images and words of the philosopher Bergson, the time that is determined in being, between relativity and finiteness. In the semi-darkness of the room, Francesca Romana Cicia’s work entitled “Come una conchiglia nel bosco” (“Like a shell in the woods”) (2024) is configured as the ‘vertical line’ of the project, both on a semantic and pragmatic level. In fact, the installation involves the ceiling and floor of the project room, thus disrupting the potentially disciplining space of the white cube, in favour of a procedure that follows inner motions and inclinations. Looking upwards, three ceramic works of different sizes defy gravity; they are verisimilar plant forms in shades of cyan blue – in keeping with Cicia’s stylistic signature – that could inhabit both marine and terrestrial ecosystems. They are like anemones of memory and, as such, their nature knows no categorisation. Directing the eye downwards, one glimpses ceramic fragments similar to petals, which trigger in the viewer a relationship of meaning, between the sky, the ‘place’ of spiritual ineffability, and the earth, the place of mortals, concretely recalled in space by the presence of the inorganic material, scattered throughout the exhibition area.
Eirene, “Outer Spaces”, 2024, mixed media, variable dimensions, installation view at Spazio Iris, Spoltore (PE), 2025. Ph. Francesca Pascarelli
The show continues horizontally with Eirene’s work entitled “Outer Spaces” (2024). Perceptual ambiguity persists, this time through a constellation of eggshells that, in a rhizomatic manner, are spread over the white surfaces of the room. These ‘external spaces’ manifest themselves in the cavities of the egg, in that shell that historically is the symbol and enigma of birth and life; they are fragments of the cosmos, echoes of galaxies, other solar systems. All set in the semi-dark atmosphere, which in some points allows sidereal space to emerge, while in others it eclipses it, creating a play of shadows, as a natural expansion of the universe with its infinite worlds. In this interpretative key, time leaves no room for words such as ‘past’, ‘present’, ‘future’, reminding us of the conventionality of periodization, from which, as the curator Laura Catini writes, «we infer that the evo, like each of the periods of history identified in the long during which the affirmation and development of certain elements of civilisation and culture takes place, is an abstract representation that man has designated in order to create mental paradigms and, consequently, to better imprint a sense of belonging in life, as a reaction to oblivion».
Valeria De Siero
Info:
Francesca Romana Cicia | Eirene. Evo oblïato
curated by Laura Catini
22/02/2025 – 14/03/2025
Spazio Iris
Via G. Fonzi, 38 – Spoltore (PE)
www.mauraprosperi.com
is a contemporary art magazine since 1980
NO COMMENT