Ieri distrattamente mi volsi a considerar altrui memorie (dalle quali mi ritrovai rinvigorito) F.P.

Yesterday I Turned Distractedly to Consider Others’ Memories (by Which I Found Myself Reinvigorated) F.P.

 

curated by Andrea Acquilanti

Davide D’Elia defines his works as “water-divining frescoes”, and it’s not by chance that he chooses as an image for his exhibition an ancient representation of the water diviner, of the searcher for water, a character halfway between a scientist, a wizard and a guru. Because his works will really search for water on the walls of the gallery: because his works are made of mildew.

The artist traced the outlines of the openings in the ceiling of the gallery and transferred them to the walls. Within these outlines he activated a guided cultivation of mildew; operating with chemical agents and a scientific control of the room temperature, Davide D’Elia waited for days for traces of the fungal proliferation to appear.

The gallery presents itself, then, marked by the artist’s passage or rather by the reproduction of the passage of time: the work approaches the flow of time by narrating it to us in first person.

Davide D’Elia works with the residue of “what remains” and with the aesthetic of continuous transformation that obliges us to consider the passing of things. The artist works not only with life’s evolving but also with the traces of life now finished, capturing them and aestheticising them. His works become a site of truth, of absence from subterfuge, of the beauty of the infinitely small and the infinitely alive. His manner of working not only rejects any form of protection against time, but desires this time, searches for it, waits for its evolutions.

The works of Davide D’Elia are compositions made with mildewed canvases, with a highlighting through lamps or frames of already mouldy places, made with shadows, traces. Works that strain to reveal, and to gratify, the beauty of our transience and of our time that passes, or rather that is passing.

The exhibition is curated by another artist, Andrea Aquilanti, with the idiom that is his own: a work of art. Aquilanti, who for years has worked on the concept of split vision producing works of great poetry and lightness, whose painting and drawing combine with video projection, will project his commentary on the work of D’Elia onto one wall of the gallery.