A sentimental architecture; a declaration of love and fear of life. This is Serena Fineschi's approach in Vogliamo parlare d’amore? (Do we want to talk about love?) which opens at Palazzo Monti, Brescia, on February 15th 2020, following collector Edoardo Monti’s invitation.
Melancholy given by absence, pain by deprivation or exclusion are exorcised by reactivating gestural memory: performing past events is a way to put them back into the world, give them a shape.
These are often minimal traces, sometimes imperceptible: gestures full of attention, which can mark us much more than those shouted out or the inattention that fills our present time in a consumed world.
The exhibition develops in two rooms. In the first, we find works related to childhood or adolescence and family and friendships are brought into the game, bringing in real "mnemonic cocoons".
The second contains more turbulent works, typical of adolescence and adulthood, dealing above all with the role that the body plays with sexuality.In the new body of works produced for the exhibition, Serena FIneschi reiterates, in physical contact with clay, the tender movements of affection and the moments of bewilderment that have accompanied her over time.
Small signs in everyday life become footprints, they are coagulated, frozen in the matter in the form of caresses, pinches, hugs, kisses, massages, handshakes, bites, sometimes in dialogue with objects that belong to domestic life.
Serena Fineschi's hands and whole body adhere, glide and modify clay, skin to skin, bringing them back to life in a vivid way, toning the artist's personal sentimental framework and the network of relationships that accompanied her. Clay - a rustic and ductile material - is a perfect companion in this approach. It is only the touch that guides the creation of the works, view comes later.
The body of the works enters a relationship with the physical body, restoring a tangible dimension to past experience.
But love is also bitter: it contains and holds sharp tongues, words that hurt like knives that pierce the flesh.
Without rhetoric, the love, affection and pain received and returned, accompany the creation of our identity: they make the body a compelling and incontrovertible vehicle of who we are and why we are today.
To accompany this new project, short stories, archives of intimate moments recreated with the language of personal memory.
The exhibition itself is an intimate diary in which the body is always the protagonist, proposing at the same time a new variation of performances in all the other works on display, historical and new, scattered throughout the spaces of the building: in the papers attacked and bit with bitterness and anger , in the lip marks printed on paper, in the pen writings - a tribute to painting - that fill voids and time spent waiting, in the chewed gum as indigestible events and relationships ... all works in which the gestures of the artist’s living and active body on materials are a real extension of the body itself.
The body gives, but also receives from the manipulated objects and matter, to the point of presenting itself as one with them.
A reflection could be opened not only on the demiurgic aspect of gestures but also on their real therapeutic value ... Marina Dacci
ph. Petrò Gilberti
