For Nanda Vigo (Milan, 1936 – 2020), space results from the multiplication of luminous surfaces. For Anna Franceschini (Pavia, 1979), time manifests in infinite rotations and eternal oscillations. Both artists share the clarity of intentions, and brightly limpid thoughts make way for mystery and the shaping of an esoteric “elsewhere” where anything can happen as long as it obeys the universal laws of physics. Now, a fascinating exhibition in Pescara City celebrates their affinities. From 27th March to 15th September 2023, Vistamare hosts Passeggiate Intergalattiche, an exhibition of work by Anna Franceschini and Nanda Vigo, in collaboration with the Archivio Nanda Vigo.
Based on an idea by Anna Franceschini, the exhibition represents a dialogue between two artists who have, at different points in time and other contexts, given expression to a shared focus on the themes of movement and observation, reflection and light, in works as varied in their materials as they are eclectic in their inspiration. Beginning with its title, Passeggiate Intergalattiche (Intergalactic Outings) is an exploration of space-time, an intimate and spiritual voyage into different dimensions, and simultaneously an adventure in science fiction, all in the name of light. Direct light, reflected light, dark light, light emitted or light withheld: it might not necessarily render things visible, but this light certainly demands to be seen. At the basis of both artists’ intuitions, there lies a disarmingly simple grammar and some radical concepts.
If, throughout Franceschini’s work, the trigger is cinema, Vigo, by the same token, triggers a spatial ferment, a disturbance in the architectural context that results in a continual movement of the image. Her mirrors, the Cosmos (1981) and the Andromedas (1974) are doorways into the infinity of space; they puncture their architectural surroundings and penetrate the matter beyond. Franceschini’s machines, meanwhile, invite us to step beyond the threshold of the familiar and lose ourselves amid infinite reflections and parallel universes engorged with possibilities. The exhibition occupies all six rooms of the gallery, which Franceschini has redesigned to resemble living spaces: interiors that open onto other interiors, stretching out into the infinite. As in the closing scene of Stanley Kubrik’s 2001 A Space Odyssey, human intelligence transforms the universe into the places that haunt our personal and collective memories. In the gallery’s main room, gently lit by the luminous disks that bloom on Nanda Vigo’s Light Tree (1983/84), a majestic kinetic sculpture by Franceschini rotates, exposed to view with all the modesty and grace of a straightforward explanation. From every possible angle, La meccanica degli elementi (The Mechanics of the Elements, 2022) continuously reveals its three elements, which sit on a steel pedestal and are in the colors of the sky just before sunrise or sunset. The elements’ placement might change (the artist has not imposed a single, predetermined display form). Still, they would, in any case, exhibit the grace that comes of movement – that movement which is a defining feature of life.
Further rotation is in the video Do you know why they respect me? Because they think I’m Dead (2019), where, arranged in ritual patterns, apparently unfamiliar or now-meaningless objects vibrate with a cosmic magnetism. Viewers are invited to stand behind the frosted glass of two of Nanda Vigo’s legendary Cronotopi, and observe the moving images through these distorting sculpture lenses. So, each Cronotopo becomes a cinematographic device: a translucent medium offering access to another visual dimension. The calm, all-involving rotation in the gallery’s main room is the prelude to a moment of even greater contemplativeness: a room wrapped in velvety darkness from which blue interstellar lights and feminine gestures emerge, scattered across an abstract cosmos. Soft presences occupy other rooms: subjects/objects made of fur and synthetic wigs which challenge the commonplace hierarchies of animate and inanimate objects, gently and discreetly taking possession of spaces that embody the quintessence of a sitting room, a study or a dining room. And then even the dining table is transfigured into a repertoire of forms employing a set of sculpted plates, Pompei (1992), created by Nanda Vigo with her friend Annibale Oste, its far edge occupied by miniature statues (figurines with a particular fondness for stretching their hands out in hunger) which reach out longingly towards a short film by Franceschini where a tiny torchbearer finds amusement in the multiplication and blurring of his own mirrored image, seen again and again, as it rotates.
