BEATRICE SPADEA
Notes from another world
April 14th 2023/June 3rd 2023
Opening: Friday April 14th 2023 @6.30PM
Notes from another world is the first solo exhibition of Beatrice Spadea.
If the enclosed space, a house or shelter, is conceived as an intimate and protected place, for Beatrice this dimension becomes a pretext to play with her imagination and bring the viewer to a different spatiotemporal location. Through seemingly simple and easily recognizable forms – branches, leaves or starry skies – Beatrice tries to reveal a more ancestral aspect, the aspect that in a fantasy universe we conveniently perceive as possible.
In the exhibition are developed works and installations that enclose a body of works created over the past year: paintings on canvas, drawings on paper, embroidery on tulle, and large installations composed of colored wooden structures and pulled threads delicately intertwining.
Silhouettes rich in symbolism that take shape in our dreams, but not only in night dreams, because the protagonist of the exhibition is the daydream, that vision or hallucination that consciously amplifies everything. The leaf becomes a forest, the star becomes a whole cosmos…
The artwork Je Suis L’Espace Où Je Suis (Io Sono Lo Spazio In Cui Sono) is the crucial piece of the exhibition. Explicit quotation taken from the precious book L’état d’ébauche by Noël Arnaud illustrated by Max Bucaille, from which the artist extrapolates his inspiration by reflecting on space and time as omnipresent factors intertwining in a harmonious dance. The result is a rhomboidal structure that evokes an enclosed space that refers – through the delicate weaving of pastel-colored threads – to a penetrating dimension. A spatiotemporal tunnel, precisely Gateway.
To access the exhibition’s core, after bypassing the entrance installation, one must cross a curious threshold of leaves, a forest, which conceals and reveals at the same time. A few details anticipate what will be beyond, but only by going further this cascade of leaves – installation titled Threshold Of A Dream – will it be possible to enter the dream designed by Beatrice. From here, each person is abandoned in its own dreamlike journey. On the walls, elegant graphite drawings on Japanese paper frame the recreated space. A black and white dream in which spatial cognition must go beyond, no location, no direction… what Beatrice most desires is to suggest the multiplication of the indefinite and to bring us closer to the mysterious. The forest is vital silence, silence that comes alive with life. This body of works is encapsulated in the Rêverie della Foresta series; rêverie meaning precisely a fantasy in which to walk.
The journey continues and the vision opens to a boundless space. The gaze rises from the dense forest and is lost in the immensity of the universe. On the deepest wall of the gallery, five paintings on canvas render the image of a starry night sky: La Segreta Geometria della Notte. It’s a transition time from night to day. The vision changes completely; from the complex reticle of the forest, where any spatial reference is nullified, now the stars return a point of reference. It’s like finding yourself after being lost.
Lively in space, two more installations – Desiderio and A Dive Beyond – are conceive as portals. The series – which ideally revolves around the possible journey to other worlds, to the Elsewhere – moves across the boundary, delineated by the interwoven threads, between the known world and the unexplored world. A window to the unknown.
This post is also available in: Italian