Alice Visentin

Everyday Mystery

Opening: Thursday, October 3, 2024; 6pm-9pm

October 4 – December, 2024

From Tuesday to Saturday, 11am – 6pm

Gió Marconi, Via Tadino 15, Milan

Shapes – more and less distinct shapes – flicker across the canvases of Alice Visentin’s paintings. Overlapping, seeping into one another, they seem to be manifesting or dissolving, as if captured in moments of flux.

Allowing water, shadows of plants and other external factors to define the flow of the initial base colours, Visentin outlines, almost sketches, creatures, figures, single letters or whole words on top of or proceeding from them. A sense of letting go, of a loss of control, even of trance emanates these paintings – a wanting towards chance as the harbinger of mystery. In this relinquishing of control is a sense of spontaneity that gives the paintings a hypnotic quality: a warm, magical, fluid world of images and stories. These images and stories are not figures of the imagination – they are recognizable and familiar as objects, scenes, expressions and symbols of our every-day. Apples sit beside tongues, the moon, a teary eye, an angel, two people sharing a bed, hearts, a gaping face, a shoe.

Visentin summons this dream-like world from a fill of genres that span the history of the magic lantern to cartoons to doodles. The visual politics behind this aesthetic is far from the idea of the painter whose stroke is conceptual, whose reference can be clearly placed against a canon. It is akin to the surrealist interest in defying logic in representation. Yet, unlike surrealism, Visentin does not ask ‘why’, how to map the psyche, but is rather more engaged with the experience of the sensual and perhaps, more than an unlocking of the author’s unconscious, the paintings are an allegory of a self morphing into another. They are driven by a deeper, more bodily sense of transformation, where the self is constantly shifting, evolving, and dissolving into the world around it, a self in the process of becoming. Not knowing, one might think the work was made collectively – not two but more hands, not one steady but several different rhythms.

Lit from behind, fore- and background merge, the flat canvas unfolds a fictive space encompassing layers of dream-like fragments, appearing somewhere between painting, shadow play and set design. Laid out on a table, fragments of canvas are laid out like books. Moving between the works, they relate to the body, create meditative spaces of intermingling shapes that allude to landscapes, faces, expressions, mythological animals, plants and many other forms. Their installation seems almost archaic, like cave paintings holding memory and telling a story, evoking a sense of the historical that is deeply aware of its gap to reality. As much as they look back, though, they too look forward, playing freely with references in order to forge a new vocabulary that seeks to re-enchant the world.

Geraldine Tedder